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Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

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Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#121

Red cabbage or Blue Cabagge, in northern Germany is also called red cabbage (Rotkohl), same color for some regions of Austria and Switzerland (Rotkraut). In southern Germany it is called Blue Cabagge (Blaukraut). If you ask people in Germany what the color of the vegetable is, they will answer "purple" (lila). There are some strange ways in the evolution of a language, depending on the region and events in the region…

I don't think this distinction stems from the same source. Blue/green distinction is a clear step in linguistic development that happened in different stages for different civilisations, but they're more of a result of linguistic developments, local available colours, and manufacturing capability than a reference to plants.

This particular cabbage is coloured by a chemical that responds to the pH of the stuff it comes into contact with. The colour can range from quite bright red to quite clear blue, and even green or yellow.

It's perfectly possible for the red cabbages to be turned into blue dishes, and the pH of the soil will also have a large effect on the colour produced by the plant. You can see on various stock photos how the plant has a clear blue hue (before harvesting, at least): https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/rotkraut.html?pseudoid=562... Even ignoring the leaves, the outside of the parts that generally get cooked have a clear blue hue in many pictures I can see.

The reason "lila" wasn't used to describe the cabbage is that the German language lacked a word for it. It entered the German vocabulary somewhere in the 19th century (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lila#German). In a similar fashion, there was no separate word for orange in many European languages until somewhere around the 15th-16th century, when oranges (the fruit) were starting to get imported. You had yellow-red and other hue combinations, but it wasn't as separate as it is today.

I'm sure there were people who used "Rotblaukohl", but it makes sense that only one colour remained.

As for the carrot, orange carrots were actually not all the common for centuries. The original plants now known as carrots were imported to Europe from the middle east and cultivated in the Netherlands, but orange carrots weren't all that common in Europe before the 16th/17th century. The base plant of the orange carrot was actually white/yellow and got its orange outside hue quite some time later, after selective breeding. I wouldn't be surprised if the carrots that were first exported to modern German areas were still yellow in colour. Gelbrübe for orange carrots makes a lot of sense, historically.

I do like the "purple yellow root" name, especially since the first carrot cultivars to reach Europe (long before orange/yellow carrots) were actually purple. I don't think they received quite the popularity carrots received, at least not much further north than the Mediterranean.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#122
post #86

Just a data point that I want to put out there. I have long heard that Japan has blue traffic lights. Earlier this year I visited Japan. Because I had heard about the blue traffic light situation, I paid special attention to the traffic lights. They all appeared green to me. In both Tokyo and Osaka. Okay maybe a tinge of blue if you look at it and wonder 'is this blue?' , but the only reason I wondered was because I…

you would know if you read the article :)

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#123

They speak of this as if it was a Japan-only thing. The blue-green distinction is a late feature of most languages. Even Greek and Latin did not have as clear a distinction as we have today.

Yeah and they also don't realise that "one word for two colours" is just nonsensical. All words are descriptions for a continuous range of colours. Oa apparently just covers a particularly huge range. But you could equally say "ha those stupid English people only have one word for lilac and purple. Idiots!"

I think the most common real-world example is Russian and Italian, which have a specific word for light-blue which is distinct from the word for blue.

I assume this is like how ‘pink’ is a special word for ‘light-red’.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#124

Red cabbage or Blue Cabagge, in northern Germany is also called red cabbage (Rotkohl), same color for some regions of Austria and Switzerland (Rotkraut). In southern Germany it is called Blue Cabagge (Blaukraut). If you ask people in Germany what the color of the vegetable is, they will answer "purple" (lila). There are some strange ways in the evolution of a language, depending on the region and events in the region…

Carrots were originally white/yellow. The Dutch made an orange variant at some point.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In English, things that are orange are often called red. Particularly, but not limited to, hair.

And orange juice is actually yellow. Which really blows some people's minds. "Well it's a little bit orange." No it's not, not your regular American bottled or fresh OJ. Straight-up yellow. (Not denying there are varieties that produce more orange-color juice, like tangerines. But that's not what's on 99% of Americans' breakfast tables.)

It's juice of the fruit-called-orange. How is that not orange juice? We don't call apple juice "red juice" or grape juice "purple juice".

If there's a language in the world where the color and the fruit aren't the same word, I've yet to learn it.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In English, things that are orange are often called red. Particularly, but not limited to, hair.

And orange juice is actually yellow. Which really blows some people's minds. "Well it's a little bit orange." No it's not, not your regular American bottled or fresh OJ. Straight-up yellow. (Not denying there are varieties that produce more orange-color juice, like tangerines. But that's not what's on 99% of Americans' breakfast tables.)

At least the fruit it comes from is actually orange (and is the origin of the name for the color I believe.)

But if you ever look inside of a fresh North American blueberry, they're pale green! European blueberries might actually be blue inside, I'm not sure.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#128
post #6

The Reader's Digest article is just a mediocre summary of the Atlas Obscura one it links to: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-green-traffic-li... Although the latter does contain a complete misrepresentation of what "grue" means. The explanation is still unsatisfying. Japan had green lights, referred to in law by a word which means blue but has traditionally encompassed green as well. Pedants pointed out t…

> This is, on the face of it, completely insane behaviour, but neither article attempts to explain why the government did this.

How is it insane? Did the outcome turn out to be chaos and mass murder? Are the Japanese people all becoming lunatics due to the cognitive burden of trying to remember the differences between one foreign color word and the other? Will the Reticulan Space Navy destroy the Japanese for their insults to chromaticity?

This isn't insane. It's just boringly bureaucratic.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#129
post #50
post #29

Not a linguist. I feel like this is just an issue of imperfect correspondence between the word "blue" in English and "ao" in Japanese. The article explains the historical reason why ao encompasses both blue and green, so I think the concept of semantic field comes into play here. As an analogy, a MacBook is a type of laptop, and laptops, desktops and tablets are all IT devices (for lack of a better word). Apple might…

I trained as a linguist and you hit the nail on the head. Word meanings are fuzzy clouds of references and nuances, and every language has slightly different clouds. There is nothing magical about this, despite the recurrent lizard-brain notion that words or names are somehow mystical and intrinsic, and that these differences must somehow be meaningful. Differences are quite common with colour terms - you don’t need…

Words do seem to have some influence on perception. Specifically, colors appear to be easier to distinguish if they fall within the bounds of separate basic color terms (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104).

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#130
If you go out and buy LEDs for use in a traffic signal in North America, you will have to specify the colour as "cyan". That is because the monochromatic wavelength sits in the place between green and blue. So the same sort of situation in naming occurs in that part of the world too. You can call the colour green, but you could just as legitimately call the colour blue. It really just ends up being a convention.
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