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It's not just the traffic lights in Japan, it's the traffic lights all around the world, if you're a Japanese person. My wife and I always refer to it as blue w

It's not just the traffic lights in Japan, it's the traffic lights all around the world, if you're a Japanese person. My wife and I always refer to it as blue when speaking Japanese and we live in my home country. It's jus St a cultural norm and the truth is not actually important to human beings, so it doesn't surprise me. They call grass 'blue' too. There's even a familiar expression with a Japanese twist that goes "The grass is bluer on the other side". Apparently "blue" used to be a pretty wide range of colors ranging from quite very dark, almost black blues to normal blue and the kind of green that is often referred to as blue. Japanese has a fairly large number of loan words for colors indicating some colors were introduced to their lexicon through contact with foreigners. Pink is an example of that. They have 'sakura-iro' which represents the color of cherry blossoms but it's not a proper representation of pink by itself as you wouldn't use it to refer to say a hot pink. The level of cognitive dissonance I have to endure every time we're stopped at the lights still irks me.

rangibaby 8y ago
As you discovered 青 is another word for green, they do not actually think that grass is blue. > Japanese has a fairly large number of loan words for colors indicating some colors were introduced to their lexicon through contact with foreigners. Orange (橙色） is named after the fruit like in most languages (including English!) Shades of pink are all named after different flowers, just like the English word. 牡丹色 is pretty close to "hot pink" (although the Japanese word is ショッキングピンク, shocking pink).
fenomas 8y ago
Yeah, when this was last on HN I looked into it and apparently 青 historically meant any cool or pale color. The article mentions set phrases where it referred to green, but there are others that don't - 青ざめる (to turn pale), 真っ青 (pallid), etc. Interestingly, 青 historically applied to such a wide range of cool colors that it survives in contradictory ways - e.g. 青毛 (blue+hair) refers to a black horse, while 青馬 (blue+horse) usually means a white horse.

rangibaby 8y ago

As you discovered 青 is another word for green, they do not actually think that grass is blue. > Japanese has a fairly large number of loan words for colors indicating some colors were introduced to their lexicon through contact with foreigners. Orange (橙色） is named after the fruit like in most languages (including English!) Shades of pink are all named after different flowers, just like the English word. 牡丹色 is pretty close to "hot pink" (although the Japanese word is ショッキングピンク, shocking pink).

fenomas 8y ago

Yeah, when this was last on HN I looked into it and apparently 青 historically meant any cool or pale color. The article mentions set phrases where it referred to green, but there are others that don't - 青ざめる (to turn pale), 真っ青 (pallid), etc. Interestingly, 青 historically applied to such a wide range of cool colors that it survives in contradictory ways - e.g. 青毛 (blue+hair) refers to a black horse, while 青馬 (blue+horse) usually means a white horse.