161–170 of 268 posts
Color in general can be subjective, even between people of the same culture and language group. There's an interesting experiment with color in this video around yellow lasers that might help get the idea across.
I'm not sure if there's any connection to why Japanese tend to lean towards blue rather than green but the Japanese word for green, midori (緑) is linguistically different from most other colors. It doesn't have a true adjective form and is instead used as a noun or "adjectival noun". Does this difference create a subconscious aversion to it in the Japanese psyche? I really have no idea.
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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.
The Greek said the sea was green, for example; so did the Romans. The Romans did have a word for blue, but it only applied to the sky.
This isn't exactly a surprise; they were both heavily involved with the sea.
English speakers talk about the sea being blue, but that's not because it is blue by the standards of English speakers. It's because most people don't bother to give any thought to the things they say. If you go look at the sea, it is obviously green.
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…
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…
I am looking out my hotel room window in Hiroshima in this very instant, and I even got my wife to confirm it: The traffic lights definitely are GREEN.
They are green. Japanese people just call them blue (青). The colors we call green and blue are just ranges on a spectrum. Where you draw the line between them to call one green and the other blue is partially a matter of personal perception and maybe more a matter of culture but there is no absolute right answer. I'm not sure if there's any connection to why Japanese tend to lean towards blue rather than green but th…
> Hundreds of years ago, the Japanese language included words for only four basic colors: black, white, red, and blue. If you wanted to describe something green, you’d use the word for blue—“ao”—and that system worked well enough until roughly the end of the first millennium, when the word “midori” (originally meaning “sprout”) began showing up in writing to describe what we know as green. There's something going on…
https://kotobank-jp.translate.goog/word/%E9%9D%92%E8%91%89-2...
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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 are not perception. This is such a pernicious bit of nonsense > pseudo-intellectual mysticism The influence of words on perception is backed by a lot of research and expertise, and seems apparent on a concrete level: The words I choose affect others perceptions; people who make their living in persuasion (political leaders, opinion leaders, 'influencers', etc) put great effort into chosing words that will inf…
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…