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Comment by wirthjason | Hacker News Reader

    > Languages treat this spectrum in different ways: Some have separate words for “green” and “blue,” others lump the two together. Some barely bother with color terms at all.

Although not mentioned in the article, in Japan the the street light for go is “blue light” (青信号) while in the US it’s a “green light” despite being virtually identical in color.

I’m not sure how this came to be but it’s s fun to dispute amongst international friends (particularly while drinking).

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As a color blind person I go when the light is blue. I don't see green well, so most stoplights get a blue tint to help people like me see the color better.

Most stoplights - it was a shock to me driving one dark night when one of those white lights in front of me suddenly changed to yellow. It didn't have any blue tint, and there was no other indication that I was at an intersection as opposed to just a badly aimed street light. (I has never driven that road before, so I didn't have any other clue)

> Japan the the street light for go is “blue light” (青信号

I love these sorts of things. Language fascinates me so much, I hope to learn more about linguistics some day.

> particularly while drinking

Hopefully not while driving through blue green lights!

Language is fascinating. I’ve found it interesting that two different cultures can have the exact same idioms. For example in English I say “goosebumps” while in Japanese it’s exact same, tori-hara (鳥肌) or chicken skin. Both cultures map the concept to a bird’s skin.

On a separate linguistic note, you’d probably really love the book “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff. It’s all about how languages have the power to hide and highlight. It blew my mind when I first read it.

One of my favorite wikipedia articles is “Cross-Linguistic Onomatopoeias”[1] because it’s fun to look at the similarities and differences. An article of cross-linguistic idioms would be even more interesting! But probably much more difficult to compile.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoei...

Cross-linguistic idioms would be interesting to see. I suspect it has a lot more to do with the etymology of the idioms than anything else. For example, I know that the idiom "I'm a big boy" (meaning "I am capable") works in English and Russian, but in Turkish it comes out sounding more like "I'm a large child". Actually, I found lots of idioms are identical in English/Russian (there are some unique ones to each language), and I suspect it comes from a shared European ancestry.

Wikipedia reckons that the “go” light was originally blue. The colour became green to match the international convention, but the name didn't change.

=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_light#Variations

That’s why no one should blindly trust Wikipedia. There’s no evidence for the Japanese “go” light ever having a blue color, the first traffic lights in Japan were imported from the US and the first Japanese traffic law to mention traffic lights called them 緑 (green) not 青 (green or blue depending on the context).

Also, in the US lights used to be a pure green but were updated to be a blue-green so that color blind people could differentiate the green from red. You can still see the original green in some super old lights that haven't been updated.

Doesn't Japanese have two words for green, one modern and one old, before the blue-green distinction?

It does: midori (緑) and ao (青)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ao_(color)#Ao_versus_midori

They also say the English “green”, as pointed out in the Wiki article. So there’s 3. :)

In most context ao is definitely blue. It’s not green at all. The color of the sky is blue. Blue as green shows up in a few spots, the city/prefecture Aomori, the blew Forrest, or aotogarashi, the blue chili pepper (which is like a mini Serrano). I’m not an expert on the language but I’m sure there’s a bunch more.

The color of unripe bananas 青い (Aoi).

A "greenhorn" or other inexperienced person is also Aoi.

A youth / person in the springtime of their life is 青春.

> A "greenhorn" or other inexperienced person is also Aoi.

The etymology of that is different though. In Japanese it's because babies have a blue spot on their ass.

青 encompassed both blue and green until the Meiji era, even now there are plenty of common words that use “ao” in place of “Midori” See: 青菜、青リンゴ、etc.

At one point the traffic law referred to 緑色 traffic lights, but was updated to 青色 post-war in the 1940s. It still means ao (green) not ao (blue).

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