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English is weird
cesium133:
--- Quote from: pwhodges on 06 Dec 2020, 15:52 ---Japanese is the well-known example. The classical word is ao (or aoi) which covers both. But later they added midori for green, which is commonly used; however, ao has not become restricted to blue, and will be used for the colour of a traffic light for go, or even by some for vegetables. Interestingly, this has gone the other way, and the "green" traffic light in Japan is often distinctly blue!
However, the overlap of these colours has actually occurred in many languages, as Wikipedia will tell you.
--- End quote ---
Something that sticks out at me about the horizontally-mounted Japanese traffic lights is that green/blue is on the left. Some areas in the U.S. (in particular, Texas) mount the traffic lights horizontally like that, but red is always on the left.
pwhodges:
In the UK, traffic lights are never horizontal.
--- Quote from: Morituri on 06 Dec 2020, 20:12 ---See, I would just translate that word as 'turquoise' which is a color name in English for a shade between blue and green.
--- End quote ---
But turquoise is a fairly specific shade in the middle of the range. Ao can be any part of the whole blue and green range.
Akima:
--- Quote from: cesium133 on 06 Dec 2020, 20:27 ---Something that sticks out at me about the horizontally-mounted Japanese traffic lights is that green/blue is on the left. Some areas in the U.S. (in particular, Texas) mount the traffic lights horizontally like that, but red is always on the left.
--- End quote ---
It would be tempting to think that this had something to do with the right to left reading that was traditional in Japan, and persists in the reading order of panels in manga, but it is not obvious whether red should be the beginning or end of a "line".
In Australia, as in the UK, traffic lights are always vertical with red at the top. So no, our traffic lights are not upside-down.
Morituri:
I started writing a response then consulted a wikipedia article and thought this is better information than what I was going to say....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate
cesium133:
I was thinking it could have to do with Japan driving on the left-hand side of the road (like the UK and Australia), but without any other left-driving countries known to mount lights horizontally, it’s not clear if it’s because of that, or something that’s just particular to Japan.
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