https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
https://www.verywellmind.com/the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-7565...
Knowledge that some hypothesis where disproved is also crucially important to understating and formation of sounder models.
Regarding the adequacy of the assertion itself, every reader should judge by themselves to which level it extends.
Mad that they just add the numbers thing there, but never mention if there's a number play with green/blue
https://www.jenkins.io/blog/2012/03/13/why-does-jenkins-have...
I still don't forgive Jenkins for giving in and replacing blue with green.
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 have you believe that a MacBook is very different from a laptop and belongs in its own category, but to me I would still lump it under laptops. If I was presented with a MacBook, a desktop and a tablet and was asked to pick out the laptop, then it would be clear to me that the MacBook is the correct choice.
Now, midori (green) is a type of ao ("grue"), and ao, kiiro (yellow) and aka (red) are all colours. English speakers argue that green is very different from blue and that they're different colours, but to Japanese speakers ao encompasses midori. If a Japanese speaker was presented with the colours green, yellow and red and was asked to pick out ao (in the context of traffic lights), then it would be clear that green is the correct choice.
There are loads of situations where words in two languages seem to directly correspond to each other, but still they are subtly different especially when the nuances of the words are considered.
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.
https://www.thebrickfan.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/LEGO-...
That would be a good point, if that actually happened, but Japanese traffic lights have a mixture of green for go and blue for go (with most of them being green).
But there also are some basic truths about human vision.
We only see three "simplified" different colors, red, blue and green, and other nuances are interpolations our brains make. There is infinitely more frequency information in light that we just don't pick up.
So I would expect that the primary colors red/blue/green, which are grounded in human physiology, were universally recognized across languages. To the extent they're not, that's confusing.
Language is certainly not the sole factor of conscious interpretation of all phenomena, stimuli and mechanisms that induce it, but it definitely is a factor with measurable effects.
And probably this is a skill where individual feel like the largest degree of freedom — the topic of whether this feeling is a mental illusion or backed on hard-wired physics is a distinct point.
Trying to destroy credibility of whole class of people striking them with an anathema like "mysticism" implies forgetting a bit quickly that Descarte’s grand scheme of thought came to live thanks to three dreams, Newton was found of alchemy and Russel dedicated a whole essay specifically to "Mysticism and Logic".
> I assure you I see these colours the same as you do.
Maybe not if I’m colour blind, right?
Now, this is not to promote the extreme other side: I don’t believe in an "absolute relativism" that would allow culture to shape arbitrary anything anyway regardless of any fundamental conditions that enabled human beings to form.
But certainly there a whole set of shade between this two poles (and beyond the linear spectrum they induce).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect
https://www.cairn.info/qu-est-ce-que-rever--9782749256627-pa...
> pseudo-intellectual mysticism
The influence of words on perception is backed by a lot of research and expertise, and seems apparent on a concrete level: The words I choose affect others perceptions; people who make their living in persuasion (political leaders, opinion leaders, 'influencers', etc) put great effort into chosing words that will influence perception, and they do it to great success.
Why do you think otherwise?
What makes you say otherwise? When you say 'pernicious', that implies negative intent - whose intent? (If that's not meant literally, I take back this particular question.)
Surely no one believes a native English speaker only experienced schadenfreude after that word was imported from German?
I assure you that you do not. Don't want to get too philosophical or biological on you but we all see colors differently. Every single one of us. Even identical twins.
It isn't. TFA is vague on this, but in modern usage "ao" just means blue. There are a bunch of set phrases where it refers to various other cool colors, but to a modern listener "ao" on its own isn't a category including all those colors, it just means blue.
Especially the fact that it tends to impact the speakers ability to perceive shades of the color.
I have long heard that Japan has blue traffic lights.
Earlier this year I visited Japan.
Because I had heard about the blue traffic light situation, I paid special attention to the traffic lights.
They all appeared green to me. In both Tokyo and Osaka.
Okay maybe a tinge of blue if you look at it and wonder 'is this blue?', but the only reason I wondered was because I had heard the blue traffic light trivia. If I had never heard about it I wouldn't have given it a second thought.
However, the picture in the linked article seems to have an unmistakable blue color; I don't understand what's going on.
Beautiful country by the way; would love to visit again :)
Although the latter does contain a complete misrepresentation of what "grue" means.
The explanation is still unsatisfying. Japan had green lights, referred to in law by a word which means blue but has traditionally encompassed green as well. Pedants pointed out that it would be better if the law explicitly said green. Rather than changing the law or letting things be, the government ordered lights be changed to blue-green. This is, on the face of it, completely insane behaviour, but neither article attempts to explain why the government did this.
Then in the 1970s the rules changed to recommend bluer shades of green, and new lights made afterwards reflected that. None of the articles I found gave a concrete reason; a few suggested bluer lights were easier to see, and a few implied the change was motivated by the "ao" name.
How is it insane? Did the outcome turn out to be chaos and mass murder? Are the Japanese people all becoming lunatics due to the cognitive burden of trying to remember the differences between one foreign color word and the other? Will the Reticulan Space Navy destroy the Japanese for their insults to chromaticity?
This isn't insane. It's just boringly bureaucratic.
Some example photos from google image that look closest to what I've seen: https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/item/129881591-traffic-l... https://depositphotos.com/editorial/traffic-lights-ginza-dis...
I've not really left Kantō so maybe they are more likely to be more prominently blue elsewhere? Kansai and Hokkaidō google image searches show (mostly) green traffic lights too.
In southern Germany it is called Blue Cabagge (Blaukraut).
If you ask people in Germany what the color of the vegetable is, they will answer "purple" (lila). There are some strange ways in the evolution of a language, depending on the region and events in the region.
It's normal, whatever normal means in this case, to think that a color is the same as a similar hue, in my example above, between red and blue you can find purple, violet "lilac" hues.
As a personal anecdote, the name for (orange) carrot in Southern Bavarian dialect is Gelberübe, Rübe for root vegetable and Gelb for yellow, also yellow is connected with orange in the brain and the language of the people.
A purple carrot has the honor to be called "lilane GelbeRübe", or purple yellow vegetable root in English.
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...
I’ve since noticed that I think this question of where “that is definitely green” ends and “that is obviously blue” begins is different for lots of countries
Here is a good video on colour and how many cultures perceive colour and name them, or not.
"The surprising pattern behind color names around the world" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg&t=35s
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...?
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.
They appear green because of the warmer light that incandescent bulbs give off. I imagine that things transition to LED they’ll choose warmer light frequencies to continue this effect? https://mytrafficlights.com/why-does-the-green-lens-on-my-tr...
I think that they turned to blue for things of years and years of sun rays and raining and other climate things.
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.
青天 - clear skies
青草 - green grass
清葡萄 - 청포도 - white grape
When traffic lights were first created, they simply didn't have the technology to create a great pure yellow, so amber was used instead, and people understood the color they were aiming for.
Now I live in the US and the lights here look the same as NZ but I'm pretty badly colorblind so they're just words to me :)
Horizontal rather than vertical lights were new to me here. They make sense because they don't swing around in the wind.
I'm not sure if there's any connection to why Japanese tend to lean towards blue rather than green but the Japanese word for green, midori (緑) is linguistically different from most other colors. It doesn't have a true adjective form and is instead used as a noun or "adjectival noun". Does this difference create a subconscious aversion to it in the Japanese psyche? I really have no idea.
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 digraphs, like "mp" for English "b".
Color in general can be subjective, even between people of the same culture and language group. There's an interesting experiment with color in this video around yellow lasers that might help get the idea across.
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.
What colour is this? Blue.
No, can't you see it's green? Maybe it has some green in it
Okay, so is it blue or green? Yes!
That adjective in Japanese means both blue and green. The Japanese language didn't have a widely-adopted word for just "green" - 緑 (みどり) "midori" - until after WWII.
Green apples or vegetables are still "aoi", for example. I lived in Japan for four years and never saw a blue traffic light.
Why they do that is something you can argue about and I’ve heard Japanese try and come up with all sorts of explanations:
“The character for blue is easier to learn than the one for green, so it’s better to say blue with children.”
“They used to be blue, so we still just call it that”
“Green isn’t an original Japanese color. Before foreigners arrived we didn’t call anything green”
“They are blue!” - usually these are people who will call traffic lights in Europe and smarties blue even when speaking English.
It’s just a quirk. I think Japan places the border between blue and green different from most western cultures and that gives.
The traffic lights have an abnormally high amount of blue light for being an overall green light, to help people with red-green colorblindness to tell the difference between the red and "green" light.
If you take a look at the green light on a dash cam, you might see that the color is abnormally bluer than what you might see in real life.
> www.rd.com
> Checking if the site connection is secure
> www.rd.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.
>Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
Which you'd know if you read the guidelines (:
But well, the US never follows any agreement it signs, so yeah, that happens.
Since then I have rendered all figures for public consumption in black and white, and lines instead of surfaces where possible.
Here's a talk by the creators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAoljeRJ3lU
Here's a little article about it (with some R specifics): https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/in...
Also, another way to find out how common colorblindness is among your male friends: go rock climbing in a gym. Color is used on the holds to signify the route, and colorblind people who quickly start asking about color as they're climbing.
I just turn that on, open the camera and look at my color pallete through the camera.
I see green lights as white, which is fine most of the time because of the order.
The exception is when there's a lot of glare from the sun setting behind me, and I sometimes can't tell if it's green, or just the sun reflecting at the right angle. It also washes out the red and yellow, making it harder to see if they're lit.
For 3 lights streetlights no. For 2 lights streetlights it depends. They can be (in DE) either red and yellow or yellow or green.
The people who do not see red at all however, see red as black. So, they do not see red traffic light at all.
That argument has two issues: First, not all US traffic lights have order, as single-light ones replace stop signs in some (mostly suburban/rural) areas. Second, light position is still hard to discern at night.
My personal take: the red and yellow hues in traffic lights are often indistinguishable for those of us with red-green colorblindness.
For example, if you cook it with apple (which is acidic), it will turn redder.
This particular cabbage is coloured by a chemical that responds to the pH of the stuff it comes into contact with. The colour can range from quite bright red to quite clear blue, and even green or yellow.
It's perfectly possible for the red cabbages to be turned into blue dishes, and the pH of the soil will also have a large effect on the colour produced by the plant. You can see on various stock photos how the plant has a clear blue hue (before harvesting, at least): https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/rotkraut.html?pseudoid=562... Even ignoring the leaves, the outside of the parts that generally get cooked have a clear blue hue in many pictures I can see.
The reason "lila" wasn't used to describe the cabbage is that the German language lacked a word for it. It entered the German vocabulary somewhere in the 19th century (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lila#German). In a similar fashion, there was no separate word for orange in many European languages until somewhere around the 15th-16th century, when oranges (the fruit) were starting to get imported. You had yellow-red and other hue combinations, but it wasn't as separate as it is today.
I'm sure there were people who used "Rotblaukohl", but it makes sense that only one colour remained.
As for the carrot, orange carrots were actually not all the common for centuries. The original plants now known as carrots were imported to Europe from the middle east and cultivated in the Netherlands, but orange carrots weren't all that common in Europe before the 16th/17th century. The base plant of the orange carrot was actually white/yellow and got its orange outside hue quite some time later, after selective breeding. I wouldn't be surprised if the carrots that were first exported to modern German areas were still yellow in colour. Gelbrübe for orange carrots makes a lot of sense, historically.
I do like the "purple yellow root" name, especially since the first carrot cultivars to reach Europe (long before orange/yellow carrots) were actually purple. I don't think they received quite the popularity carrots received, at least not much further north than the Mediterranean.
This is totally it, some people just decided to name it the way they saw it, and depending on the region were they lived.
Rotblaukohl was probably the middle ground, but there's in German a rule to join two colors: das blaurote Kleid (the blue-red dress), in this case it would mean the dress has two colors blue and red.
I might be very far from my area of expertise TBH.
Very interesting. Could you explain this part in a little more detail?
There is a well known trick (I don't know if there's actual research behind) that when asked for a tool and a color, people will answer red hammer. There are many tools and colors but these come to mind quickly because they are so frequent, simple, etc. Therefore the concept used for information retrieval implicitly creates a set of all possible words that satisfy it. For instance "bird" will make the person think of pigeons, sparrows, crows, so it naturally implies "flight". It's only by precising either "flightless" or a specific flightless bird that the association is removed. The implication goes both ways: flightless birds tend to not come to mind, despite chickens being extremely common. Furthermore, it is quite counterintuitive to just take arbitrary conjunction of categories (e.g. a bird or a chair). By comparison, discriminating further is very easy, and people tend to be able to much easier think of different elements of the same subcategory (e.g. different breeds of pigeons).
Koans tend to revolve around erroneous thought or language patterns, and so having the "blue or green" category was an obvious example of falling into either of my known boxes (blue or green) before being reminded that the concept encompassed both.
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 Japanese word; (2) option #1, but the Japanese meaning of the word later shifts; (3) option #1, but the Japanese spelling of the word later shifts [this would be weird]; (4) indigenous innovation of a character; or (5) refusal to use a character at all.
"Midori" appears to have begun its life by being spelled as if it meant "green" and to have continued to mean "green" since that time. This is strange if it originally meant "sprout", and I'd like to know more about the claim and the history.
https://kotobank-jp.translate.goog/word/%E9%9D%92%E8%91%89-2...
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.
Already in Homer the word for blue was "cuaneos", which means of the color of "cuanos", like "chruseos" (golden) means of the color of "chrusos" (gold).
"Cuanos" was initially the name for the blue pigment that now is named "ultramarine blue", which was an expensive pigment imported from Afghanistan.
Later, "cuanos" was also used as a name for other cheaper blue pigments that could be used to substitute the expensive ultramarine blue, i.e. for the azurite mined in Cyprus and for the artificial pigment "Egyptian blue".
The English word "cyan" comes from the Greek word "cuaneos", but due to a misunderstanding it is used now for blue-green, despite the fact that it was never used for blue-green by the Greeks. In the Ancient Greece and Rome, when blue-green had to be distinguished from green, it was specified as the color of the beryls, or as the color of turquoise, or as the color of the littoral sea.
While in Greek there was an unambiguous word for blue, what was missing was a word for green. Green is mentioned very rarely in what I have read, and when it is mentioned they use one of the following expressions: the color of the emeralds (smaragdinos), the color of grass (poodes) or the color of leek (praseos).
In the early Greek authors, "chloros" that is now used to mean green in many scientific terms was not used for green, but perhaps for yellow or yellow-green, e.g. Homer uses "chloros" for the color of some honey.
The Romans did have a word for blue, but it only applied to the sky.
Which other countries have blue traffic lights?
綠 is used in Japanese for the color of green tea, but they use 青 for the green light
There's also 翠 in Japanese to mean a bright green, which in Chinese also has a blue connotation (based on the color of the kingfisher who dives 淬 to catch fish)
All words are descriptions for a continuous range of colours. Oa apparently just covers a particularly huge range. But you could equally say "ha those stupid English people only have one word for lilac and purple. Idiots!"
I assume this is like how ‘pink’ is a special word for ‘light-red’.
results like this AFAIK are real (have not been found irreproducible, or limited to e.g. Russian), but, what they demonstrate is best understood in the specific terms of their hypothesis and findings—the "risk" or possible alternative being, to extrapolate the "pernicious" lay belief into some strongish Sapir-Whorf "your reality/my reality."
I.e. measurably faster performance on discrimination tasks, does not map broadly to "perceives differently." Your phrasing was appropriately nuanced, "influences" is a reasonably lay summary...
...but "Japanese-as-first-language speakers perceive blue and green as differently as e.g. English speakers" is still definitely much more true than the alternative.
Personally I was sad to learn strong S-W didn't hold up. It is quite a captivating idea. So too this popular middle ground around color naming.
I find it quite interesting the way experiments like this are construed to try to tease apart linguistic, cognitive, and perceptual factors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell#/media/File:Cone-fun...
So, defining the separation between Red, Blue, and Green is really fairly arbitrary.
At my last eye test at the RMV, the clerk tried to tell me I wasn't color blind. I mean, sure, I've been able to drive with it for 40 years, but I know damn well I'm color blind.
https://www.ontario.ca/document/official-mto-drivers-handboo...
That the color region that word encompasses doesn't match that of the English words "green" doesn't really matter, and is not particularly mysterious.
> “In 1973, the government mandated through a cabinet order that traffic lights use the bluest shade of green possible—still technically green, but noticeably blue enough to justifiably continue using the ao nomenclature,” Allan Richarz writes for Atlas Obscura.
There is another one to the right as well. They look very blue when turned off, but cyan/green when turned on.
> I think the original poster is referring to the intent of those that believe in (the strong version of) the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which isn't the scientific consensus (at least it wasn't when I studied linguistics/psychology).
When "is not scientific consensus" is considered abstractly, it DOES NOT equal "is false" (if everyone has adequate background knowledge, and is thinking clearly)...but if you observe people (including actual scientists/linguists) discussing concrete instances that involve these abstract notions, then it "almost always" DOES "equal" "is false"...and, if one is to point out the error, it tends to be not well received (rejected due to "pedantry", or one of 5 or so other memes).
Higher in the chain:
> 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.
Human communication and perception has substantial dependencies on language, and language has a dependency on consciousness, which science does not understand[1] - therefore, pick whatever label you want to attach to this state of affairs, but it is magical/mystical.
> I trained as a linguist and you hit the nail on the head.
At runtime, this tends to render as: ~I know it to be objectively true that you are objectively correct, because I have the necessary specialized training.
> I assure you I see these colours the same as you do
At runtime, this tends to render as: ~It is a fact that I see these colours the same as you do.
> Words are not perception.
This is kinda true - they are (to the degree that they are....which is not known, so the mind conveniently swaps in a simulation, but does not notify us) a fundamental component of perception, but they are not equal to perception - perception has a dependency on words - in general, and on which specific words are used or not) during communication of an idea.
> This is such a pernicious bit of nonsense....
~That which seems like nonsense to me, is(!) nonsense [to everyone].
> ...and journalists and writers are especially susceptible to it because it flatters them, in their role as word-smiths.
~Other people suffer from naive realism and overactive ego, but not me!
> Languages are way more interesting than this pseudo-intellectual mysticism.
~My map of what "mysticism" is is identical to what it actually is (roughly: silly and incorrect "woo woo" would be my guess).
> 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.
This seemingly innocuous claim highlights one of the biggest problems in English, and Western culture: we use the same word (ie; to be) to communicate two ideas with subtle but very importance in meaning: "it is a fact that it is" vs "it is my opinion that it is".
And yes, I appreciate that all this "is" "just" "pedantry", but it also plausibly affects the frequency and severity of war and various other suboptimalities in the world, that in other threads people "assure me"[2] "are" ~"a big deal". Well, if these things actually were a big deal, you'd think people would treat them as such. Sadly, I am very confident that there are people in powerful positions (political "public relations") who understand all of what I say here and much more, likely much better than I understand it.
[1] Notice how I used "understand" with no qualifying terms? This is deliberate, because I have pre-knowledge that this is a scenario where humans get very confused (and often emotionally motivated, depending on the topic, and consciousness is one of those topics) when performing categorization (much of which is sub-perceptual). A soft whorfist might say: This "is" trolling (because that is how it appears to them, and how things appear is how they "are").
[2] it "is" a fact that
While the word 綠 to mean green has been attested as far back as 1000 BC, the idea that it was a separate color rather than describing a shade of 青 is relatively more recent. Wikipedia[0] indicates that it was adopted in the early 20th century in Chinese (as part of vernacular language reforms) and after WWII in Japanese, though these claims are currently marked with [citation needed]. While both are relatively recent, the usage in Chinese did have a longer period of time to take hold.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
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.
EDIT: I apologize for the vague sourcing!
Some colors that look very real cannot be a single wavelength of light, like magenta. That color is a figment of our imaginations. (Rather, there is no wavelength of light that stimulates your long wave receptors and short wave receptors without stimulating the medium wave receptors. But, magenta does, because it's actually a blue wavelength and a red wavelength.)
Should you be driving?
If I were designing them I'd always have the red be noticeably larger.
https://www.color-blindness.com/2007/02/06/colorblind-at-the...
For me personally, the green light looks much closer to a white than to, say, the green of a grass.
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?
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.
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.
But when ao is used outside of a set phrase, to tell somebody what color you're talking about, it means blue.
Nevertheless, when they wanted to describe more precisely a color, for example when Pliny the Elder had to explain the difference in color between emeralds and beryls, they used expressions like "green like the leaves" or "green like the grass" for green, and "green like the littoral sea" for blue-green.
This isn't exactly a surprise; they were both heavily involved with the sea.
English speakers talk about the sea being blue, but that's not because it is blue by the standards of English speakers. It's because most people don't bother to give any thought to the things they say. If you go look at the sea, it is obviously green.
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...
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%...
So using Chinese as an example of "another language" having green-blue confusion isn't very meaningful since modern Chinese aka Mandarin also inherits pretty much the same 青 albeit popular usage differs somewhat.
Yet the fact that there's no blue traffic light in China just hinges on the fact that people don't commonly refer to the "green" in traffic lights as 青 in China (but you could). The word 青 is used to refer to a broad spectrum of green and blue in different contexts, just happens people generally refer to the traffic lights as "綠" instead. And since there's no ambiguity to "綠" there's no confusion of whether the traffic lights should be "green" or "blue", and thus you don't see blue traffic in China (hopefully).
But in Korea they have the same confusion:
https://www.dreamstime.com/traffic-lights-road-blue-speed-li...
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.
What would the evidence for this be? It's clear that the word "ao" does not derive from the Chinese pronunciation of 青. But its meaning could easily have shifted under the influence of the spelling. Do we have a source that writes the word without spelling it 青?
Anecdotally, in high school we all took this test for a class [2] and the girls did a lot better than us. Although some guys were able to score pretty well on it. I don’t remember if this was the exact test but it’s very similar.
They’re always long threads of very confident people saying how there isn’t even a difference and I’m like lol
However, there are people who are tetrachromats, have cones most sensitive to a fourth frequency of light in their eyes, and those people are also overwhelmingly women.
It certainly seems to be rare enough to have no practical impact (except to perhaps the tetrachromat, who presumably has different metatmers perception etc.)
As far as I understand it takes having two X chromosomes with different versions of the gene that encodes the receptors for green, so only women can be tetrachromats.
" Best Score for your Gender -1000000 Worst Score for your Gender 1700045439
About your score: A lower score is better, with ZERO being a perfect score. The circle graph displays the regions of the color spectrum where your hue discrimination is low."
I hate this kind of stuff. WTF is that Best Score?
> Best Score for your Gender -2147483648
> Worst Score for your Gender 2147483647
https://boingboing.net/2011/08/12/how-language-affects-color...
If I recall, some early societies didn't have a distinction between green and blue. Given that blue often doesnt show up naturally outside of the sky and it's reflections. And in those populations they would be much less sensitive to distinctions in blue-green.
While comparing it shows typical scores as -(large number) to +(large number).
Fun test! I'd note for others, the quality of your screen can make a difference - I found one of the lines a lot easier on my phone (first try) than on my computer (second try) - though I got perfect both times.
Does anybody know how to read that?
Best: segmentation fault (core dumped)
This is different from tetrachromacy, where some women really do see more colors: https://www.optimax.co.uk/blog/tetrachromacy-superhuman-visi...
Edit: somehow didn't notice you'd linked this.
A sizeable percentage of women have tetrachromy (5% ? I forgot the exact number but it's not nothing). AFAIR men do not have tetrachromy.
So, basically, some women do actually see more colours than all the men and than most other women.
Maybe your wife has tetrachromic vision? (not sure how it's called)
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.)
If there's a language in the world where the color and the fruit aren't the same word, I've yet to learn it.
What's funny is that most people don't seem to realize that that the color of the juice isn't the color of the rind.
Just look at illustrations of orange juice on Google Images:
https://www.google.com/search?q=orange+juice+illustration&tb...
Most of them are showing an orange liquid that matches the color of the orange rind. It's hilarious. Because somehow, most people don't realize orange juice is yellow, even though they might drink it every morning.
The fruit has the color orange when it's ripe. It's probably one of the most orange things you'll see on nature.
But most people don't even eat it ripe (throwing it away before that point), and the association between the fruit and the color just flies over a lot of people's heads. And yeah, the internals of most of them are yellow.
That I have seen
Well, it wouldn't be that weird if you were right because we name fruit juices after the fruit, not the juice color, but I’ve never seen orange juice that wasn't distinctly on the orange side of yellow, even if its more yellow than orange, including fresh and bottled American orange juices.
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/B07...
That's just straight-up part of the band that we call yellow.
For comparison, here's the first result for "banana" in Google Images:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/building-a-bet...
It's 48°, even closer to orange than orange juice. Yet nobody goes around insisting that bananas are "on the orange side of yellow".
It's a case of linguistics somehow trumping what we literally see with our own eyes. It's actually quite astonishing how strong the effect is, even when it's pointed out to you.
wait what? I never seen orange juice that was not yellow (in Canada and Brazil)
So if you were to ask me the color of orange juice in Hungarian, I would reply "sárga", which is true, as it could be either "yellow" or "orange". Many people would still say it is "orange yellow" though, because the name of the color has "orange" (narancs) in it.
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.
They’re red inside
Modern american orange juice looks especially funny because (I thikn) of all the added calcium- it's more of a whitish orange which I find really off-putting.
It was the name of the fruit before it was the color of the fruit, if I'm not mistaken. Though, I suppose I'm only speculating there. It may have been awhile since I've eaten one, and I prefer the purple Moros anyway, but they've always seemed to be rather orange to me. Quite distinct from the flesh of a lemon, for instance.
[1] https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos... [2] https://www.xrite.com/fr-fr/blog/beverage-color-control
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 between.
> For comparison, here's the first result for "banana" in Google Images:
> It's 48°, even closer to orange than orange juice.
Most of the brightly illuminated top seems to be in the 48-52 range, the indirectly-lit side is mostly in the mid 40s, though there are some pixels right along the bottom edge that are also brightly lit (from the reflection from the white surface of the light source above) that hit around 60.
Its not more orange than the juice, for sure.
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?)
I'm sure that in the larger fraction of all accidents eye witnesses will at least get the basics right and that parties are not going to lie about what actually happened. But it's interesting how two minutes after an accident with five witnesses there are probably 10 conflicting stories about 'how it happened' and it makes me wary of any eye witness testimony, especially in less than ideal conditions (night, rain, distance etc). When I first heard about the above case the explanation was that eye witnesses probably heard the crash, looked up and immediately created a mental reconstruction of what must have happened based on what they saw and then reported this as the fact rather than to simply say that they didn't see anything until the moment of impact.
I really should dig a bit more to see if I can turn up something about this case, it is very interesting given your comment because you have provided another example of what I think is the same thing.
