Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

rd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 268 posts

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#251

Post by SECProto »

fenomas wrote: post #246
SECProto wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for a start, the first JP law on traffic lights in the 1930s used midori, not ao. 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...

I don't follow. Are you suggesting the link you posted contradicts something I said? If you want a source that the 1930 law used midori, see here, under 発祥期: https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E3%81%AE%...

Are you referring to reference number 184? I'm looking for a primary source for your statement that midori was the colour standardized in law since the 1930s, because the section I linked about colours explicitly calls out ao and notes the difference in different jurisdictions.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#252

Post by systoll »

mcpackieh wrote: post #126
crazygringo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> European blueberries might actually be blue inside, I'm not sure.

They’re red inside

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#253

Post by fenomas »

SECProto wrote: post #251
fenomas wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow. Are you suggesting the link you posted contradicts something I said? If you want a source that the 1930 law used midori, see here, under 発祥期: https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E3%81%AE%...

Are you referring to reference number 184? I'm looking for a primary source for your statement that midori was the colour standardized in law since the 1930s, because the section I linked about colours explicitly calls out ao and notes the difference in different jurisdictions.

> your statement that midori was the colour standardized in law since the 1930s

In 1930, not since the 1930s. The 1930 law used midori, but it was changed to ao in 1947 after that became the more popular usage. The page you linked was about the current law.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#254

Post by crazygringo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #248
crazygringo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just proving my point, of how people insist it's still somehow orange. Sure, almost nothing is perfectly a 60° hue of yellow. But the color orange is all the way at 30°. And if you look at the HSL values of the juice in product photos like the following, you'll get hue values of around 52°: https://www.amazon.com/Tropicana-Orange-Juice-No-Pulp/dp/B07... https://www.amazon.com/Simply-Orange-Pulp-Juice-Drink/dp/…

> And if you look at the HSL values of the juice in product photos like the following, you'll get hue values of around 52°: So, Just clicking around your first OJ example and checking lots and lots of pixels, in all the areas of the juice, the juice pixels seem to be mostly around 38-42, with a low of about 32 and a high of about 50. So, as I said, closer to orange (30) than yellow (60), though also definitely in bet…

I don't know what to tell you. I just checked again using Photoshop on my Mac, and the values you're reporting are just not the values.

The cap of the Tropicana bottle has hue values of 25-30°. Which makes sense, because it's clearly visually orange.

So the idea that any of the juice shows 32° is just false. That would be straight-up orange, basically the same color as the cap. But the juice isn't orange. The cap is. In fact, I can't find anywhere on the juice that is anywhere in the 30's, contrary to what you say.

The juice is not closer to orange than yellow. Full stop. It's yellow. Yellow like a banana. That's visually obvious, and it's clear upon exact measurement as well.

(The only thing I can guess is maybe you have some kind of night shift affecting color measurements on your display or something, that's making them redder than they really are?)

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#255

Post by erutuon »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #247
erutuon wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell from Wiktionary ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B7%91#Japanese ), though I don't speak Japanese, the Japanese word midori has had the meaning "bud" or "sprout", but the Chinese words written with the same character don't. Spelling and word identity are distinct. This confuses me sometimes when looking up Japanese words.

> Spelling and word identity are distinct. What I'm saying is: 1. If "midori" began with the meaning "sprout", then... 2. its spelling in early texts should have been 芽 [sprout] and not 綠 [green]. The spellings were fixed a long time before the article identifies the change as taking place. The Japanese spelling of a word must develop by either (1) the Japanese borrowing a Chinese word with the meaning of the Japanes…

Ah, I see, I misread your comment quite badly. I don't have any references to look this up in, but perhaps the ancestor of the word midori is first attested in a syllabic spelling in Old Japanese with only the meaning "sprout", and when it came to be spelled logographically as 綠, it was mainly used with the meaning "green". But the question could be asked in the Tea Room of Wiktionary, where it would probably find its way to someone more knowledgeable than me.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#256

Post by melagonster »

akhosravian wrote: post #240
troad wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for writing this. I cringe every time I see someone drop the phrase “there’s no direct English translation” as if it means there is some unique insight only able to be expressed in that language. Words aren’t isomorphic between languages, but that doesn’t tell us anything about the range of ideas that are available. Surely no one believes a native English speaker only experienced schadenfreude after that word…

but if some word related to specific concept of culture, do these words exist before people understand the culture?

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#257

Post by adrian_b »

dotancohen wrote: post #238
adrian_b wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you. 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?

I do not know if this remains true nowadays, but in the past most Modern Greek speakers pronounced the ancient words with the modern pronunciation, because this is how it was taught in schools, despite the fact that the Ancient Greek pronunciation was very different.

This is the same like with the Latin language used by the Catholic Church, which traditionally had a modern pronunciation very unlike Ancient Latin, or how the Latin was traditionally taught in English schools, also with a modern pronunciation unlike the ancient pronunciation.

In the last half of century, in many places the teaching of ancient languages has switched to using pronunciations as close as possible to what is known about the ancient pronunciations, but I do not know if this has also happened in Greece.

The Modern Greek has replaced many ancient words with more recent loanwords, but as a reaction to this they have created a form of the language, Katharevousa, which was purged from many loanwords and which used a high proportion of Ancient Greek words. Katharevousa was used for many literary works in the past and it was the official language of Greece since independence until 1976. I do not know if there is still much use of Katharevousa for anything, except for reading the older books and other publications that have used it.

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#259

Post by kitebive »

arjie wrote: post #189

It's a nice article and has lots of details. But I searched my photo history for Japan and here are the first few that have traffic lights in them: https://imgur.com/a/S815y7o This should help you determine what colour the lights are in your perception. Some are taken with a Canon DSLR and some are taken with a Pixel 3.

Nice photos!

Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

#260

Post by glandium »

standardUser wrote: post #172

To this day I insist that American traffic lights are red, orange and green. I know what yellow looks like and that is not yellow, it is orange. As a child, I couldn't understand the concept of calling it yellow despite it emitting orange light. Now, I understand the concept of colloquially referring to things by incorrect names, but I still hate it.

In France, it's called orange.
Post reply on HN