Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green

Post by dotancohen » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 12:04 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #257

dotancohen wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by goodbyesf » Tue, Oct 24, 2023, 3:55 PM UTC

troad wrote: post #50

yznlp wrote: 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…

Post by taway1237 » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 12:48 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #157

NeoTar wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’.

You see the same thing in other areas. In Mandarin Chinese, the sounds represented by "si" in English vision or "r" in English virile are the same sound. An English speaker (like speakers of many other languages) would find this ridiculous, but it is true that the two sounds represent either side of a completely arbitrary threshold applied to a continuous phenomenon.

Post by eric-hu » Wed, Oct 25, 2023, 4:39 PM UTC

my12parsecs wrote: post #219

eric-hu wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know more about the history of this color use? It’s surprising to me that midori uses the kanji for green in Chinese if it’s such a recent idea in Japan.

I don’t know about the green kanji, but the traditional “Jueju” Poem by Chinese poet Du Fu has the line “山青花欲然”, and “青” the Kanji for Blue in Japan means green in this context, as it describes “山” which means mountain. By the way there’s a variety of kanji that reads “aoi” in modern Japanese. 青い, 蒼い, 碧い are all “aoi”, but we use 青い mainly as blue today.