[yznlp]

Not a linguist. I feel like this is just an issue of imperfect correspondence between the word "blue" in English and "ao" in Japanese. The article explains the historical reason why ao encompasses both blue and green, so I think the concept of semantic field comes into play here.

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.

[troad]

I trained as a linguist and you hit the nail on the head.

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.

[codys]

On Purple vs Pink: it seems that might explain Lego's official name for pieces one might call "pink" use "purple" (with various modifiers) instead.

https://www.thebrickfan.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/LEGO-...

[lewispollard]

> it doesn’t actually matter what convention they pick, so long as everyone agrees on it and sticks to it.

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).

[jamseason]

The Japanese specification for the color of traffic lights is certainly written in Japanese. If the specification says the light should have color "ao", then either blue or green or something in between that matches it is OK.

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.

[wlonkly]

The article talks about the specification and it's more... specific than that:

> “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.

[MichaelZuo]

So there was an intentional decision to adjust the lights to their conceptual preferences. Assuming someone can source this 1973 cabinet order.

[skhr0680]

Can you tell me the location of an actual blue traffic light in Japan?

[roer]

I went ahead and geoguessr'd one of the images of a "blue" traffic light, and came to the following: https://maps.app.goo.gl/EjYmH34YC19y3fVt9

There is another one to the right as well. They look very blue when turned off, but cyan/green when turned on.

[skhr0680]

That color is common in incandescent green traffic lights around the world, not only in Japan. The idea was to use a blue-green lens to make a mostly green light when paired with a yellow lightbulb

[deadbeeves]

The daylight and the contrast with the trees don't help, either.

[calfuris]

Words do seem to have some influence on perception. Specifically, colors appear to be easier to distinguish if they fall within the bounds of separate basic color terms (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104).

[aaroninsf]

I would say appropriately enough this at this level it becomes an issue of semantics, and pragmatics, and specificity,

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.

[BurningFrog]

The "fuzzy clouds" argument is both true and important.

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.

[Retric]

The color receptors in your eyes don’t actually correspond with red, blue, and green with the same wavelengths being able to trigger multiple receptors. On top of this your retina absorbs more blue light as you age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell#/media/File:Cone-fun...

So, defining the separation between Red, Blue, and Green is really fairly arbitrary.

[mcpackieh]

In English, things that are orange are often called red. Particularly, but not limited to, hair.

[crazygringo]

And orange juice is actually yellow.

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.)

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

It's juice of the fruit-called-orange. How is that not orange juice? We don't call apple juice "red juice" or grape juice "purple juice".

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.

[crazygringo]

No one's disputing that.

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.

[merry_flame]

A perverse feedback loop has clearly emerged. It seems that in the US at least, "To further enhance color, manufacturers add up to 10 percent vividly colored mandarin orange juice as well as pigment from orange peels." [1] Further, it seems that juice colour is actually designed and kept consistent. [2]

[1] https://www.americastestkitchen.com/cooksillustrated/how_tos... [2] https://www.xrite.com/fr-fr/blog/beverage-color-control

[marcosdumay]

> 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.

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.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

If the fruit were very unripe, when it has a green rind... I would still call it an orange, not a "green".

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.

[gerad]

But we do call it red (and white) wine.

[monkeywork]

>grape juice "purple juice"

That I have seen

[dragonwriter]

> 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.

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.

[crazygringo]

You're just proving my point, of how people insist it's still somehow orange.

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.

[dragonwriter]

> 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°:

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.

[jacquesm]

That's very interesting. We tend to use a lot of logic as a layer on top of our senses to tell us what we are looking at. One of the most interesting cases (which I can't find a reference for, so sorry) of this that I've come across was an accident in Amsterdam where the person whose car was involved in an accident swore that the other car in the accident had gone against traffic. But from the situation after the accident and eye witnesses it made no sense to believe this. But much later some security cam footage was submitted as evidence that showed the car that had gone against traffic somehow flipping into the position that showed them coming from the right and coming to a rest just like the final scene after the accident was. So, in spite of all defiance of logic the occupants of the first car had it right and the 'eye witnesses' and the accident investigators all had it wrong (and the occupants of the vehicle that caused the accident were lying and could probably not believe they were getting away with it).

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.

[FalconSensei]

> but I’ve never seen orange juice that wasn't distinctly on the orange side of yellow

wait what? I never seen orange juice that was not yellow (in Canada and Brazil)

[johnisgood]

In Hungarian there is an umbrella term that covers both the color "yellow" and "orange". To further specify it, there is "lemon ..." (citromsárga) and "orange ..." (narancssárga). This umbrella term is "sárga" and it gets translated to "yellow", so "narancssárga" is "orange yellow", and "citromsárga" is "lemon yellow".

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.

[mcpackieh]

At least the fruit it comes from is actually orange (and is the origin of the name for the color I believe.)

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.

[systoll]

> European blueberries might actually be blue inside, I'm not sure.

They’re red inside

[dekhn]

Orange juice, like milk, is complicated because it's a suspension and has subsurface scattering, which makes its behavior in different lights very different and much more complicated than "take a picture and check the HSV").

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.

[doubled112]

I recently watched a YouTube video about how "brown" is only a colour because we call it one, but it is really "dark orange" with context.

[vijaykiran]

This one https://youtu.be/wh4aWZRtTwU?si=OZcgqx82umx67VWo probably

[doubled112]

That's the one.

[silveira]

I heard it is because the word "orange" is much newer. There were very few things orange in Europe before they saw the tropical fruit orange. Carrots and other things that are orange today were not orange back then.

[HNDen21]

Wait till you find out what they call a blonde person in Croatia :-)

[9991]

I'm still waiting.

[j33zusjuice]

They call it blue.

[psychoslave]

Did you ever tested the Stroop effect in a language, and how it effects depending on the proficiency in that language?

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...

https://www.philomag.com/articles/le-reve-de-descartes

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25447/25447-h/25447-h.htm

[wolverine876]

> Words are not perception. This is such a pernicious bit of nonsense

> 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.)

[kelvie]

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).

[mistermann]

As a believe in Hard Whorfism, I think this is rather excellent evidence in support of it...

> 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

[akhosravian]

Thanks for writing this. I cringe every time I see someone drop the phrase “there’s no direct English translation” as if it means there is some unique insight only able to be expressed in that language. Words aren’t isomorphic between languages, but that doesn’t tell us anything about the range of ideas that are available.

Surely no one believes a native English speaker only experienced schadenfreude after that word was imported from German?

[melagonster]

but if some word related to specific concept of culture, do these words exist before people understand the culture?

[goodbyesf]

> I assure you I see these colours the same as you do.

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.

[vinnyvichy]

As an sort of counterbalancing aside, there are two common japanese words for red, the slightly less well known to foreigners is the name for the color of the sun on the japanese flag: beni/kurenai (a deeper red). Well Chinese has the parallel kanjis too but as far as I understand it for the Chinese the semantic values are flipped: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-%E8%B5%...

[hangonhn]

Chinese has yet another word for red: 彤. It closer to vermillion or what some people might recognize as "Chinese red" that one sees painted on doors and temples.

[fenomas]

> Now, midori (green) is a type of ao ("grue"), and..

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.

[sam_lowry_]

How do you think this happened? By westernization?

[naniwaduni]

Consider: is "red hair" a color you would consider "red" in a generic context? How about "red cabbage"? Are they the same color?

[skhr0680]

You’re going to have to define modern usage because words where ao=green are still common in every day language, like seishun or aoba

[fenomas]

In set phrases it can refer to things of various colors, but on its own it means blue. Like if you use it to describe a sweater, people will assume you mean a blue sweater.

[skhr0680]

If those words and others were more obscure I’d agree with your point, but they really are common enough that I think Aoi can mean blue or green in nodern Japanese.

[fenomas]

Obscurity isn't involved. In set phrases like you're talking about, the "ao" is basically a category specifier, not a color specifier. Like aoba means young fresh leaves, not necessarily green ones, and aoyasai doesn't only mean green vegetables, etc. There are lots of set phrases like this, both obscure and common, and the color involved can be anything from white to dark gray.

But when ao is used outside of a set phrase, to tell somebody what color you're talking about, it means blue.

[jrockway]

I think yellow and amber are a good example of similar confusion in English. According to the NYS driver's manual, traffic lights are yellow and marker lights on vehicles are amber. They both look yellow to me. Doing some research around the Internets, I see people insisting that governments always call traffic lights amber, but that's not true. Either way, nobody knows what "amber" means except people manufacturing lights and people that just looked it up because they're reading a comment about it. But, again, if you ask someone "is the middle traffic light amber?" they'd probably say yes, just like Japanese people will be happy to mark the green light as ao.

[sporkland]

Grue is a fascinating concept and it's much more pervasive than Japanese: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distincti...

Especially the fact that it tends to impact the speakers ability to perceive shades of the color.