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According to Japanese Traffic Lights, Bleen Means Go
- hkmurakami 9y agoNow I'm curious how blue the original lights were, since the current ones are pretty green, though not as green as in the west.
- whytaka 9y agoI think in the past the Japanese simply didn't make much of a distinction between blue and green and the traffic lights are an artifact of that.
- ekianjo 9y agoI don't think that's the case. Several cultures (not just Japan by the way) don't really have different wordings for blue and green until recent History but this has nothing to do with them not being able to do make such distinction in practice.
- Accacin 9y agoAs far as my basic Mandarain knowledge goes it was like this in Mandarin too (qīng) but I know there's seperate words for blue and green in Mandarin now.
- bruxis 9y agoA side note, now that I've recently moved to Japan, purely green lights, be them street lights or cross-walk signals, (and fruit/vegetables, oddly) are called "あお" (ao, blue) and not "みどり" (midori, green). It throws me off constantly...
- kalleboo 9y agoIsn't that exactly what the article is about?
- bruxis 9y agoIt passingly mentions that the now entirely-green lights are still frequently referred to as blue, but living in Tokyo, I very rarely see a light that I would describe as blue-toned, which seems to be the focus of the history in the article here.
- hkmurakami 9y agoWell the article mentions that the government passed legislation in 1976 to change all the "blue" lights to a tone that is the bluest shade of green.
- idiocratic 9y agoI think this is the same reason a green build is in fact a blue one in Jenkins by default. It was developed by a Japanese programmer.
- asymmetric 9y agoCorrect, here's an official explanation[0]. [0]: https://jenkins.io/blog/2012/03/13/why-does-jenkins-have-blue-balls/ https://jenkins.io/blog/2012/03/13/why-does-jenkins-have-blu...
- pluma 9y agoInteresting. I misremembered the Jenkins traffic light originally using green (I probably got confused by a plugin which changes the color) and was convinced it was a weird accessibility change. For the record: I'm green-blind and I always found the Jenkins colors confusing because red is too pale and light to provide good contrast with the blue. Hence I always assumed it was just a poorly executed accessibility fix.
- maaark 9y agoIt's worth noting that it would also help any red/green colorblind drivers. Red/Yellow/Blue is a better choice, international standards be damned.
- pja 9y agoUK traffic lights changed the green colour to something closer to cyan at some point for exactly this reason. (This might be an EU wide thing.)
- def0wt 9y agoYes, I've seen cyan led traffic lights in Spain and France. I think that's the new norm when led lights are introduced. I'd say it's for colorblindness sake mostly. They look exactly like the Japanese lights in the article. There are also some other strange norms in Europe, as the "orange" yellow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light#European_standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light#European_standar...
- pluma 9y agoWait, it's orange? I was always attributing that to my colorblindness. This might explain why I sometimes have a hard time telling the red and yellow signals apart. Thank you!
- Tijdreiziger 9y ago'Strange' depends on your frame of reference. In my (European) country, you would be ridiculed for suggesting that the middle colour on traffic lights should be yellow instead of orange.
- seszett 9y agoIt helps in the places where traffic lights can have different shapes, including horizontal, but I would imagine that it's not that much of a problem in most places where traffic lights are always vertical with green at the bottom?
- seszett 9y agoBy the way, the order of appearance of colour names in language might be more or less fixed across languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... It's a quite interesting. Though it means that while the article says "blue -- one of the four traditional colors originally established in the Japanese language along with red, black and white" (blue being equivalent to green here), yellow probably existed already as well then. Today in Western languages the same thing happens with blue and cyan. Italians will think of cyan (azure) as a colour while the French see it as a shade of blue, for example.
- evincarofautumn 9y agoIt occurs to me that this is analogous to accented letters in languages that use the “same” alphabet. For instance, in Spanish, “ñ” is a distinct letter; in English, it’s an accented version of “n”. The same applies to Swedish å/a, Polish ó/o, &c. That is, an accented letter is a “shade” in some languages and a distinct “colour” in others.
- hibbelig 9y agoAnd the Germans don't know if ä is a separate letter or not :-)
- pluma 9y agoIIRC a further complication in German is that the dots in ä/ö/ü started out as a small "e" on top of the letter, whereas the dots in most other Latin-based languages (e.g. in English ë) are mere accents. This is why the "expanded" versions of umlauts are still ae/oe/ue. The alphabet I learned as a German child in the 1990s certainly didn't include the umlauts or eszett, nor did it acknowledge them as distinct letters. The alphabet had 26 letters, the umlauts were counted separately and the eszett was always the odd one out (often considered simply a special orthographic variant of the double-s). So to that extent, the umlauts and eszett are definitely less "letter-like" than the Nordic å or ø which are proudly included in those countries' alphabets.
- im3w1l 9y agoAnd germanic languages instead didn't make a such a clear distincion between blue and black in past. Pretty interesting stuff.
- gipp 9y agoIf the video games of my childhood are to be believed, Japanese also does this for purple and black.
- selimthegrim 9y agohttps://thegeekygaeilgeoir.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/even-racists-got-the-blues/ https://thegeekygaeilgeoir.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/even-rac...
- dzdt 9y agoThis link is inserted completely randomly in the discussion tree, but it made my morning.
- taejo 9y agoNot entirely random, since it's about a language (albeit non-Germanic) unifying blue and black.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoSeconding what dzdt said - this is a very amusing and quick read that's worth stopping by.
- godzilla82 9y ago>the country faced pressure to comply with international traffic customs regarding traffic lights. It seems weird that a country would face such pressures. Is there a UN body that enforces such rules?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kgwgk 9y agoJapan (like many other countries) has not signed the 1968 conventions on road traffic and road signs and signals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Traf... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Signs_and_Signals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Sign... http://www.iard.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/United-Nations-Road-Safety-Conventions-Presentation.pdf http://www.iard.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/United-Nation...
- Shywim 9y agoWhereas in English a rookie employee might be referred to as being “green,” in Japanese they are aonisai, meaning a “blue two-year old.” Just wanted to point out that in french we refer to a rookie as a "bleu" (so, blue) and, as far as I know, we don't have the same history as Japan for colors.
- eloisant 9y agoIn France it comes from the military, during the revolution conscripts soldiers were wearing blue, while professional royal soldiers were in white. In Japan it's probably like in English, a reference to fruits that are not ripe yet (=> ao ringo).
- luxpir 9y agoA Japanese friend tells me the blue is in reference to the 'Mongolian blue spot'[0] that most Asian, Pacific, Native and African American babies tend to have.... Basically bodies with lots of melanin in them; it's a cluster of melanin at the lower back, sometimes mistaken for a bruise by carers unfamiliar with the phenomenon. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_spot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_spot EDIT: Oh, it's mentioned in the wiki article: > The Mongolian spot is referred to in the Japanese idiom shiri ga aoi (尻が青い), meaning "to have a blue butt", which is a reference to immaturity or inexperience.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- fenomas 9y agoThis explanation can be found on blogs and whatnot, but dictionaries and etymology sites don't seem to hold with it.
- fenomas 9y ago> In Japan it's probably like in English, a reference to fruits that are not ripe yet (=> ao ringo). Dictionaries I've seen say that's the case (or some suggest that the "ao" for youth was borrowed in from Chinese). But to clarify, "ao ringo" doesn't mean an unripe apple - the ao just means green there. As for "aonisai", the etymology there is murky but surprisingly it apparently has nothing to do with two year-old babies. The main theory seems to be that it's a corruption of a older phrase with a similar pronunciation but unrelated meaning.
- baldfat 9y agoReferencing an old RadioLab podcast "Why isn't the Sky Blue." http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/ That podcast states that Homer never used the color blue. As somewhat of a dead language linguist that still sits in the back of my head all the time. I am not 100% sold nor 50% sold on the idea that colors are seen only when they are defined BUT.... This article states - > In that regard, blue—one of the four traditional colors originally established in the Japanese language along with red, black and white—historically encompassed items that other cultures would describe as green—creating the concept of “grue,” the portmanteau of blue and green first coined by philosopher Nelson Goodman in 1955. Indeed, a distinct word for green is a relatively recent development in Japanese, only coming into existence in the late Heian Period (794-1185)
- jccalhoun 9y agoAs I understand it, it isn't that people don't "see" the colors if they aren't defined but that they haven't learned to distinguish between them. A similar example might be cars. I have a 2009 Honda Fit (Jazz in some parts of the world). To most people, a Fit is a Fit but because I have one, I can tell the difference between the first second and third generation just by glancing at them. If I point out the differences, someone will see them but they don't seem them instantly like I do.
- baldfat 9y ago> don't "see" the colors if they aren't defined but that they haven't learned to distinguish between them Just a difference in linguistics? You can't see what you can't define.
- jccalhoun 9y agoit isn't that they don't see it but they don't distinguish it. There is the tired cliche of someone going to a paint store and looking at 20 shades of "white" that all have different names and saying "they all look white to me." Of course the person can tell they are different shades of white but they don't break them down into different names.
- clarkevans 9y agoIn Mesoamerica, yax refers to colours on blue-green spectrum including malachite greens, and azurite or indigo blues [1]. These ancient people used pigments of varied saturations and hues in their paintings. [1] Veiled Brightness : A History of Ancient Maya Color; Stephen Houston, et al.
- JshWright 9y agoTom Scott has a great quick explainer on this linguistic quirk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TtnD4jmCDQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TtnD4jmCDQ
- gjm11 9y ago> In that regard, blue—one of the four traditional colors originally established in the Japanese language along with red, black and white—historically encompassed items that other cultures would describe as green—creating the concept of “grue,” the portmanteau of blue and green first coined by philosopher Nelson Goodman in 1955. Maybe this is mere pedantry, but Goodman's "grue" and "bleen" did not mean anything like "bluish-green" or "colour ambiguous between blue and green". His definition was something like this: an object is grue if it is green and it's not yet 2000-01-01, or if it's blue and it's 2000-01-01 or later; "bleen" is the other way around. What's the point of these silly-sounding definitions? Goodman was thinking about empirical induction, the process where you see lots of ravens, observe that they're all black, and decide "hmm, looks like ravens are generally black". So, suppose it's the year 1990, and you've seen lots of grass in the springtime and it's always been green. It's equally true that it's always been grue. So why is it that we're so confident in concluding "grass is generally green" rather than "grass is generall grue"? If this strikes you as interesting rather than stupid (reasonable people could jump either way), see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/#GruParNewRidInd https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/#GruPar... for more. ... Hence an email-signature joke I've seen from time to time. "It is dark and after the year 2000. If you proceed, you are likely to be eaten by a bleen."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lisper 9y agoJust for the record, Goodman's problem was solved by David Deutsch who profoundly observed that languages are theories. The grue/bleen theory has embedded within it the unmotivated (and false, though that's a detail) hypothesis that there is something special about some particular date which has been picked out of a hat and embedded into the theory in order to make Goodman's pedantic point. It is this arbitrariness and lack of motivation that invalidates the grue/bleen theory (which is actually a whole family of theories parameterized by the magic date) from a scientific point of view. There are examples of words that have times embedded in them that are actually reflective of natural phenomena and hence constitute valid theories, like "main-sequence" (with regard to stars).
- kazinator 9y agoIt would have been worth mentioning that the English language fills the gap for unambiguously expressing the blue color. The word "buruu" (ブルー) is gainfully employed in everyday Japanese. Other interesting things: because unripe fruits and such are green, the word "ao" also means unripe. "mada ao da!" --- it's not ripe. By further metaphor, anything that is young or immature, even if not a plant. "aokusai" (青くさい) --- unpleasant (to the speaker) smell of plant origin; also means inexperienced or immature, like "greenhorn". "aosameru" (青褪める) --- to grow pale. "ao" also refers to the appearance of stubble on a man's chin and face.