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.
Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green
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Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green
#42Shame the Readers Digest has gone for such a modern bland looking site, and dropped their classic logo.
Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green
#43They 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.
Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green
#44There's an amazing book on the naming of colors and more: Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher.
Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green
#45I believe that Greek, too, lacks a word for blue. Modern Greek speakers just use the English word blue as "mple" where "mp" stands in for the B sound which has no distinct letter in modern Greek.
Surprised me, and I wondered what sound Beta signifies in modern Greek. Apparently /v/.
Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green
#46> 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 here that the article doesn't explain.
The new word is written 緑, which is also [the Japanese simplified spelling of] the Chinese word that means green in specific. But the Chinese word has always referred to a color, and it's never meant "sprout" -- the shuowen jiezi, written 800 years before the period the article indicates, defines it "帛靑黃色也"!
So by the time this word is being written down, there is no sense of the concept "sprout" at all.
The article seems to present this as a case of conceptual innovation internal to Japanese, which would have been much cooler than the apparent reality of the Japanese starting to use an already well-established concept more often.
Now I want to know why, if midori originally meant "sprout", it does not seem to have the spelling 芽 ("sprout" - 萌芽也) as a possibility...?
Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green
#47If you read any Chinese/Japanese literature, for example Buddhist or zen texts, it is very common to encounter very weird uses of the words blue or green-- because they mean things that somebody used to these distinct categories will classify nature according to these boxes. Trees are green, bodies of water blue -- even if that is more complex than that, some pines can be very blue, rivers or lakes can be much greener than blue, etc.
Some translators avoid this issue by always using the term "blue/green", which is really awkward, and I couldn't find any explanation for it before learning about "the crayola-ification of the world" [0]. Before I thought that was a poetic literary device.
It is really hard not to think of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis when learning about this. At the same time, taoist philosophy tends to point out that misery comes from our mind's discriminating eye; everything is categorized in boxes, good and bad, concept and not-concept. Maybe having more categories is better from a technical standpoint, but more difficult to handle from a spiritual standpoint? At the same time, this spiritual view tend to see man as needing to overcome his beastly nature, and thus this added technical discrimination is not burden since it is simply part of the path towards a higher level of consciousness?
[0] https://empiricalzeal.com/2012/06/05/the-crayola-fication-of...
Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green
#48Maybe Korea also had blue traffic lights in the past. But they still call green traffic lights 'blue' even though all of them use a green coloured light. I think the use of blue to mean both blue and green has also been present in Korea for a long time. I wonder where it came from? In my limited experience if Korea and Japan share something culturally it often has its common derivation in Chineese tradition.
Both come from the Chinese term 青 which in modern Chinese would by itself refer to colors anywhere between sky blue and grassy green 青天 - clear skies 青草 - green grass 清葡萄 - 청포도 - white grape
As vague as 青 might be, I'd have to allow that it's a more accurate description of the color of a grape than "white" is.
Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green
#49Re: Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green
#50Not 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 to go to Japanese (blue-green) or Ancient Greek (wine dark sea) for this. My own (European) first language draws a slightly different word cloud around the colours pink and purple than English does, for example. One word is only for hot pink, and the other is for purple and non-hot pinks.
I assure you I see these colours the same as you do. If I were to use the English word “purple” to refer to more of a pink hue, it would be a mere language interference error, not some mystical Saphir-Whorf insight into the culturally-conditioned operation of my retinas.
Words are not perception. This is such a pernicious bit of nonsense, and journalists and writers are especially susceptible to it because it flatters them, in their role as word-smiths. Languages are way more interesting than this pseudo-intellectual mysticism.
The Japanese are just as capable of distinguishing blue and green as anyone else, and they use blue traffic lights for the same reason they drive on the left - because it doesn’t actually matter what convention they pick, so long as everyone agrees on it and sticks to it.