According to Japanese Traffic Lights, Bleen Means Go | Hacker News Reader

According to Japanese Traffic Lights, Bleen Means Go

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> 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/#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."

Just 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).

I like that response, but to me it raises the question as to what incorrect theories might be embedded into our daily (or even scientific) language.

That's an open research question (follows from its casual encompassing of all scientific statements), and more funding is needed to make progress on it.

Personally, I would cast a very jaundiced eye on the words "published" and "tenured", and the term "Ph.D."

> 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).

Of course one shouldn't expect the philosophy of science to hold to the same rigour as science itself, but this seems just to be shifting the goalposts. Of course, you and I know that the definition of 'grue' is arbitrary and unmotivated, because it is made to be so; but how can one define when a hypothesis in a seriously propounded scientific hypothesis is arbitrary and unmotivated? If the test for whether a theory is a good description of natural phenomena is whether it is a good description of natural phenomena (to take your exact words, whether it is "actually reflective of natural phenomena"), then it seems that we have substituted a tautology for a paradox to no particular gain in understanding.

No, because language itself can be empirically and even mathematically grounded. The fact that I can say to a shop-keeper, "Please give me an apple" and with odds much greater than chance end up in a particular state that I call "having an apple" is evidence that the word "apple" really does correspond to something meaningful in the physical world.

Here's a more detailed explanation:

http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/03/why-some-assumptions-are-...

Occam's razor addresses that question, I believe - if there is a time-independent alternative that just as good an explanation and is simpler overall, it is taken to indicate that the posited time-dependence is spurious.

Deutsch is a physicist. Unless you can provide evidence of prominent philosophers applauding his contribution, it seems a bit glib to say he solved the problem posed by Goodman.

It's their conversation, they get to decide what's admissable or satisfying as an answer.

> Deutsch is a physicist.

so was Einstein. physics, philosophy, math, and a lot of other fields reward being able to find simplicity / symmetries. it's probably best to not discount people or their theories just because of a label attached to them.

Actually, I was trying to get at the fact that disciplines do operate like conversations: you can make an unsolicited contribution from outside to a philosophical discussion, but it's unlikely to be well received. The HN crowd probably has no difficulty seeing how this would be the case with e.g. (a recent example discussed here) "trisectors". Well, philosophy has its cranky outsiders too, up to and including Hawking (arrogantly?) declaring philosophy obsolete.

On the date he wrote the paper, he was a philosopher ;-)

If a philosopher has a substantive objection to Deutsch's analysis, I will take it seriously - just as seriously as if it were made by a physicist.

I would be more inclined to view that as a solution if it didn't seem like a restatement of an objection anticipated by Goodman in the original paper. The time-sensitive nature of 'grue' and 'bleen' arises because we take 'green' and 'blue' as basic, and define 'grue' and 'bleen' in relation to them. If we took 'grue' and 'bleen' to be basic, then our definitions of 'green' and 'blue' would be the ones with the additional time parameter.

The idea of language as a hypothesis sounds a bit fishy in general. Not least because hypotheses generally need to be expressed in a language. Which language should we use to test other languages? I am also not sure whether it makes sense to take about languages as being false. And presumably, since it appears that English and Japanese constitute different hypotheses about colour, which one is the false hypothesis, and what constitutes good evidence against it?

By 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_...

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.

It 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.

And the Germans don't know if ä is a separate letter or not :-)

IIRC 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.

in Polish you have both ó and u, which are pronounced exactly the same, but words using them are inflected differently

>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.

The same thing happens in Japanese. When I describe something that's light blue as "ao," I will invariably get a confused look and a "You mean mizuiro ('water color'), right?"

But to me, a native English speaker, it's still blue.

There's quite a bit of interesting discussion of this sort of thing in Guy Deutscher's book "Through the language glass: Why the world looks different in other languages".

It's a great book, I can very much recommend it to anyone who is interested in languages!

> yellow probably existed already as well then

Apparently Japanese traditionally only had the four - what the article calls "red" was used for any warm color, and "ao" covered any cool color.

Interestingly, the usage was pretty fluid. Now that I read up about it, it seems that "ao" was used for anything from pale gray all the way to dark purple overlapping with black. This survives curiously in some quasi-archaic usage - 青毛 (lit. "blue fur"), meaning a black horse, and 青馬 ("blue horse") for a pale gray or white horse.

I don't think the blue horse thing is an example of this, as it also exists in English to some degree.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brabanter.jpg

This horse is considered a "blue roan".

> I don't think the blue horse thing is an example of this

An example of what? Japanese "ao" referring to white or black horses is a direct holdover from ao's vague early usage, but that doesn't mean it's unique to Japanese.

I'd imagine the "blue roan" thing is due to "blue" having earlier meanings of gray or lead-colored, but a quick google didn't turn up any explanations about the horse specifically.

> Italians will think of cyan (azure) as a colour while the French see it as a shade of blue, for example.

Same in Russian - синий and голубой are usually translated as "blue" and "light blue".

Weirdly, English doesn't seem to have any problem with red and pink; you'd almost expect it to use "red" and "light red".

Pink is the name of a flowering plant. It was adopted as a color name the same as with orange.

As a German living in the US I'm sometimes uncertain how to properly distinguish between the German colors "rosa" and "pink". German "pink" is probably a little bit brighter than American "pink". The "rosa" is a very soft pink. The best translation for "rosa" is probably "rose-colored". However, it always feels off to me. In German "rosa" is a very common color whereas "rose-colored" is more of a comparison than a real color name. I mean even "periwinkle" has its own proper word. We don't call it "smurf-colored". It always makes me feel like I'm missing a very important color word. It's probably the only part of the English language that still makes me feel very uncertain and like I'm missing some fundamental word.

Edit: so I just had a discussion with my American wife about it and according to her "Rosa" is pink and German "pink" is hot pink. Now I think what might make this confusing to me might just be the different meanings of the same word "pink". Solved.

It sounds like you're describing magenta. It's a more saturated pink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magenta

> Weirdly, English doesn't seem to have any problem with red and pink; you'd almost expect it to use "red" and "light red".

I recall a throwaway joke in the Borderlands presequel, involving a particle effect a designer wants to be 'light red' but 'NOT PINK'. Which it turns out is a reference I didn't catch about from ye olde RvB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgi_YPxE5Kk

There was an article I read a while ago on this subject that was pretty interesting:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/what-is-blue-and-how-do-w...

On that note about language there's this talk, which covers language's role in the blue/green distinction, phonemes with L/R, and persistent sense of cardinal directions:

http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/26/how-language-shapes...

When you have a continuum, most distinctions are to some extent arbitrary, and the simplest distinction scheme is the dichotomy.

This line of thought leads me to wonder just how fixed these categories are. Given two languages, each with two words for colors, such that one word in each language would be used for things we call red, and the other for things we call blue, do they agree on where the boundary lies?

I 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.

Correct, here's an official explanation[0].

[0]: https://jenkins.io/blog/2012/03/13/why-does-jenkins-have-blu...

Interesting. 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.

Whereas 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.

In 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).

A 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

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.

This explanation can be found on blogs and whatnot, but dictionaries and etymology sites don't seem to hold with it.

> 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.

I think in English it probably refers to unseasoned wood, which people in the past would have been familiar with.

Referencing an old RadioLab podcast "Why isn't the Sky 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 -

As 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.

> 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.

This is silly. They're not alien creatures. They have the same eyes any human does, and those eyes receive the same electromagnetic waves that comprise what we call colors as you do. They can certainly see everything you see, they just describe it differently.

it 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.

If you look at the experiments that have been done, it boils down to categorizing. It's not that people (with normal colour vision) are any less able to see the differences between colours, just that they're less likely to sort them apart unless a finer sort is needed. Test native English speakers the same way, and you'll find that they've got this "red" word that covers both scarlet and crimson (and used to cover orange as well), and a totally inadequate "yellow" that goes from something very nearly orange to something verging on green. Both of those words are more finely divided in other languages (including some "grue" languages), and the speakers of those languages will initially categorize things accordingly, where an English speaker can easily do it on a second pass when it wouldn't occur to them to make the distinction on the first.

>As 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.

No, this is also wrong and implies some kind of superiority. It's not that other cultures that describe colors differently haven't learned to distinguish between them, it's that they categorize them in different ways. Our terms for colors are not fixed features of the universe, and different peoples will categorize the visible light spectrum differently. No one way is more sensible or right than the other. The historical Japanese word "ao" described a spectrum of colors that covers that part of the visible light spectrum that we in English divide into two categories (blue and green). This isn't an inability to distinguish, it's a different way of thinking.

It's not about seeing or not seeing, it's that they're not organizing what they see in the same way you or I do.

I think I am trying to say the same thing.

Keep in mind, just because historical Japanese (or anybody) didn't have a name for a given color doesn't mean they couldn't talk about it. There's no reason they couldn't have talked about specific things as being the color of leaves, the sky, oceans, and so forth.

All that's being talked about here is how societies decide to group up or split apart general categories of colors, not whether their language allows them to talk about specific things of various colors.

You've just restated what I wrote.

I disagree. Note that it wasn't a counter-argument, just added comment.

Incidentally if you're interested, the historical "ao" didn't really refer to a specific band of the the visible light spectrum as you suggest, it could mean any pale or ill-defined color, with "red" being used for any strong vivid color. Per wikipedia, anyway.

"I am not 100% sold nor 50% sold on the idea that colors are seen only when they are defined"

That's because it's not logical. We can tell the difference between shades of colors whether we know the names or not.

In fact, I see two walls in my house, that are painted the same color, as two different colors based on the lighting. But the color of the wall is defined.

Tom Scott has a great quick explainer on this linguistic quirk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TtnD4jmCDQ

It's worth noting that it would also help any red/green colorblind drivers.

Red/Yellow/Blue is a better choice, international standards be damned.

UK 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.)

Yes, 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_standar...

Wait, 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!

'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.

It 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?

At night one usually only sees the light's color, not its position.

I'm not sure whether you're also colorblind (experiences can differ) but I would like to disagree. The one thing that would make my life as a colorblind driver infinitely better (especially at night) are reflective frames.

If every traffic light had a frame with a reflective rim, the shape would be far easier to spot than trying to find the right circular light in a sea of street lamps and neon signs.

In Germany I actually fondly remember the old "warm" green lights very fondly. The more bluish LED ones they were replaced with are very difficult to tell apart from other lights at night and to me often appear almost plain white to my eyes. If they were even more bluish, I'd have an even harder time distinguishing them from other lights, especially if some jerk using Xenon headlights happens to pass me by.

So now we've switched over to LED traffic lights, why are they still all circular and differ by colour only?

It would be really easy to make them different shapes and colours. e.g. go = green + circular, stop = red + octagonal (like a stop sign), caution = yellow + triangular.

And germanic languages instead didn't make a such a clear distincion between blue and black in past. Pretty interesting stuff.

https://thegeekygaeilgeoir.wordpress.com/2017/09/06/even-rac...

This link is inserted completely randomly in the discussion tree, but it made my morning.

Not entirely random, since it's about a language (albeit non-Germanic) unifying blue and black.

Seconding what dzdt said - this is a very amusing and quick read that's worth stopping by.

If the video games of my childhood are to be believed, Japanese also does this for purple and black.

In 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.

>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?

Japan (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_Traf... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Sign... http://www.iard.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/United-Nation...

Now I'm curious how blue the original lights were, since the current ones are pretty green, though not as green as in the west.

I 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.

I 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.

As 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.

A 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...

Isn't that exactly what the article is about?

It 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.

Well 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.

It 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.

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