231–240 of 268 posts
Mad that they just add the numbers thing there, but never mention if there's a number play with green/blue
I sell traffic lights. What you consider a “green” light in the USA is actually called “blue green”. I believe the reason for this is increased visibility for older drivers.
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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.
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?
A sizeable percentage of women have tetrachromy (5% ? I forgot the exact number but it's not nothing). AFAIR men do not have tetrachromy.
So, basically, some women do actually see more colours than all the men and than most other women.
Maybe your wife has tetrachromic vision? (not sure how it's called)
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The "go" signal in traffic lights in Japan is 青い (あおい) "aoi". That adjective in Japanese means both blue and green. The Japanese language didn't have a widely-adopted word for just "green" - 緑 (みどり) "midori" - until after WWII. Green apples or vegetables are still "aoi", for example. I lived in Japan for four years and never saw a blue traffic light.
This is pretty far off base - for a start, the first JP law on traffic lights in the 1930s used midori, not ao. Per jp references, ao/midori split into distinct meanings around the Heian~Kamakura periods (so 800-1000 years ago).
Have a source for that? This section[1] of the ja.wikipedia article could apparently use your revisions - both kanji are acceptable.
[1] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%A4%E9%80%9A%E4%BF%A1%E5...
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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
Fun test! I'd note for others, the quality of your screen can make a difference - I found one of the lines a lot easier on my phone (first try) than on my computer (second try) - though I got perfect both times.
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Maybe not more colors, but more easily distinguishes them: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/brain-babble/20150... This is different from tetrachromacy, where some women really do see more colors: https://www.optimax.co.uk/blog/tetrachromacy-superhuman-visi...
The mothers of some red-green colorblind children are tetra chromatic, so they actually see more. I think hexa chromatic also exists. Edit: somehow didn't notice you'd linked this.
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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
Best: segmentation fault (core dumped)
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Surprised me, and I wondered what sound Beta signifies in modern Greek. Apparently /v/.
In Modern Greek, the voiced plosives of Ancient Greek, i.e. beta, delta and gamma, have become voiced fricatives, while the aspirated plosives of Ancient Greek have become voiceless fricatives. To deal with the voiced plosives that are present in many modern loanwords, from languages like English, they had to develop ways to write them, using the existing letters of their alphabet, and the solution was to use digraph…
How do modern Greek speakers pronounce the ancient words? With the new sounds, or the old sounds? Are there many ancient words in modern Greek?
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 come…
This is totally it, some people just decided to name it the way they saw it, and depending on the region were they lived.
Rotblaukohl was probably the middle ground, but there's in German a rule to join two colors: das blaurote Kleid (the blue-red dress), in this case it would mean the dress has two colors blue and red.
I might be very far from my area of expertise TBH.
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…
Surely no one believes a native English speaker only experienced schadenfreude after that word was imported from German?