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Comment by jknz | Hacker News Reader

Traffic lights are green/yellow/red in the US.

They are rouge/orange/rouge in French (translation: green/orange/red).

Some languages perceive the middle color as yellow, some as orange. Because this is deeply buried in the brain since childhood, adult friends from different countries can disagree on the true color of the middle light for ages...

I am wondering if this difference can lead to different taste/connotation regarding colors in different country.

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Maybe it doesn't help that different countries do have different colors. In the US it seems the veer more toward the yellow end (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=us+traffic+light&t=chakra&iar=imag...) but in Australia the seem more orange (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=australian+traffic+light&t=chakra&...).

I've heard the center light referred to as "amber".

In the UK it's Amber. I can't remember ever hearing yellow.

In the UK it's actually a different color though. Their center lights are a light orange that, as an American, I wouldn't hesitate to call amber.

My mistake. Actually it is Spanish and French that use different colors for the middle light -- not English.

The middle light is "amarillo" (yellow) in spanish, while it's "orange" in French.

>>> They are rouge/orange/rouge in French (translation: green/orange/red).

Vert

Japanese people often use the word for blue to refer to the green traffic signal: 青い信号. They also use it to refer to greenery: 青葉. I’ve heard some explanations, but I still don’t really understand it. Maybe someone else knows why?

Words for colours don't necessarily match across different languages. This page has flashcards for colours in Scottish Gaelic:

http://www.cram.com/flashcards/scottish-gaelic-basic-words-c...

Scottish Gaelic speakers share a country with English speakers, and they all also speak English, yet Gaelic colour names don't map at all well onto English colour names.

They are blue, kinda, bureaucracy at it's best -

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-green-traffic-lig...

That’s one of the amusing but unconvincing anecdotes that I referred to above. It doesn’t explain old family names like 青葉 or 青森.

> They are rouge/orange/rouge in French (translation: green/orange/red).

My French is nonexistent, but there's a typo here, right? Should that be vert/orange/rouge?

A case of red-green colour blindness? It should indeed be vert/orange/rouge

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