131–140 of 268 posts
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With the switch from incandescent bulbs to LED traffic lights it would be very easy to change the shape of the lights: e.g. octagonal for stop, triangular for caution, and circular for go. Keep the colors, but add shape as well. Seems like an obvious and useful change to me.
That might fall apart for people with poor visual acuity.
Should you be driving?
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…
But there also are some basic truths about human vision.
We only see three "simplified" different colors, red, blue and green, and other nuances are interpolations our brains make. There is infinitely more frequency information in light that we just don't pick up.
So I would expect that the primary colors red/blue/green, which are grounded in human physiology, were universally recognized across languages. To the extent they're not, that's confusing.
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In English, things that are orange are often called red. Particularly, but not limited to, hair.
I recently watched a YouTube video about how "brown" is only a colour because we call it one, but it is really "dark orange" with context.
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You’re going to have to define modern usage because words where ao=green are still common in every day language, like seishun or aoba
In set phrases it can refer to things of various colors, but on its own it means blue. Like if you use it to describe a sweater, people will assume you mean a blue sweater.
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I'm glad you mentioned that you had your wife confirm, because I'm convinced my wife sees more colours than I do, and I can't be the only one. I've had this exact discussion. What colour is this? Blue. No, can't you see it's green? Maybe it has some green in it Okay, so is it blue or green? Yes! Why did you ask me then?
Yes, on average women can perceive more colors than men [1] Anecdotally, in high school we all took this test for a class [2] and the girls did a lot better than us. Although some guys were able to score pretty well on it. I don’t remember if this was the exact test but it’s very similar. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21675035/ [2] https://www.xrite.com/hue-test
They’re always long threads of very confident people saying how there isn’t even a difference and I’m like lol
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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.
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Most green lights in the US have a blue tint so that color blind people can see the blue. Most but not all, which is really frustrating as a colorblind person. More than once I've been sitting at a light until my wife told me it was green as there is one light near me without that blue tint. (we are making a left turn so light has both the round red stop light and the green left turn arrow on at the same time)
There is no clicking/hum that distinguishes those 2 states? If that's the case, you should probably check with council to have those nearby lights changed into disability-friendly setup. You may be surprised how effective it may be, maybe council has some part of the budget allocated to this so they will give it higher priority (or not, but at least try, you can help other people too)
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.
How do you come, that they had no distinction between blue and green? The Greek had no word for blue, which is the reason Homer described the sky with different words. But I never heard that the sky was green-isch. While on the other side the Greek had more similarities between green and yellow.
Already in Homer the word for blue was "cuaneos", which means of the color of "cuanos", like "chruseos" (golden) means of the color of "chrusos" (gold).
"Cuanos" was initially the name for the blue pigment that now is named "ultramarine blue", which was an expensive pigment imported from Afghanistan.
Later, "cuanos" was also used as a name for other cheaper blue pigments that could be used to substitute the expensive ultramarine blue, i.e. for the azurite mined in Cyprus and for the artificial pigment "Egyptian blue".
The English word "cyan" comes from the Greek word "cuaneos", but due to a misunderstanding it is used now for blue-green, despite the fact that it was never used for blue-green by the Greeks. In the Ancient Greece and Rome, when blue-green had to be distinguished from green, it was specified as the color of the beryls, or as the color of turquoise, or as the color of the littoral sea.
While in Greek there was an unambiguous word for blue, what was missing was a word for green. Green is mentioned very rarely in what I have read, and when it is mentioned they use one of the following expressions: the color of the emeralds (smaragdinos), the color of grass (poodes) or the color of leek (praseos).
In the early Greek authors, "chloros" that is now used to mean green in many scientific terms was not used for green, but perhaps for yellow or yellow-green, e.g. Homer uses "chloros" for the color of some honey.
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 :)
> www.rd.com
> Checking if the site connection is secure
> www.rd.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.
As a British person living in the USA I often enjoy that the line between blue and green shades definitely differs between cultures and there are certain shades of teal that US/UK folks will strongly disagree on. I’ve since noticed that I think this question of where “that is definitely green” ends and “that is obviously blue” begins is different for lots of countries
Here is a good video on colour and how many cultures perceive colour and name them, or not.
"The surprising pattern behind color names around the world" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg&t=35s