[HN Gopher] Why Japan Has Blue Traffic Lights Instead of Green
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Why Japan Has Blue Traffic Lights Instead of Green
Author : kitebive
Score : 38 points
Date : 2023-10-23 07:21 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.rd.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.rd.com)
| mdtrooper wrote:
| In Salamanca (Spain) there are some old traffic lights that they
| have blue (not a full blue more or less a half step between green
| and blue) color too.
|
| I think that they turned to blue for things of years and years of
| sun rays and raining and other climate things.
| kirea wrote:
| Although the color of traffic lights is determined to be green,
| there is a reason why they are called green lights in Japan. The
| green color used in traffic lights in Japan is the closest to
| blue (blue-green) within the range of CIE regulations in
| consideration of people with color blindness, and historically,
| the green color used in Japanese traffic lights is One reason is
| that the range of "blue" is wide.
| acadapter wrote:
| Color blindness compatible design is, IMO, a very neglected part
| of the equality debate, in many other fields. This disability has
| a very skewed gender ratio due to how it works genetically.
| mathieuh wrote:
| Traffic lights are still fine for colour-blind people aren't
| they? The order of the lights doesn't change.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| Night time?
| Xerox9213 wrote:
| Also lights with more than three bulbs, some indicating
| left or right turns, of which will take on two or more
| colours themselves. Some lights have a bulb above red for
| cyclists and transit. Some lights called beacons are a
| single bulb that take on several colours.
|
| https://www.ontario.ca/document/official-mto-drivers-
| handboo...
| smolder wrote:
| Yes. They can still drive fine, but don't get the benefits of
| color coding, like being able to infer whether red or green
| is lit from the light reflected off of other objects. That
| becomes somewhat important in low visibility situations where
| the position is hard to determine.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| It seems the harder difficulty is red and yellow, see the
| comments in this article, but led lights have improved the
| situation for some:
|
| https://www.color-blindness.com/2007/02/06/colorblind-at-
| the...
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Funny thing, I'm NOT colorblind and apparently I only rely on
| the color. I've been driving for over 10 years now, mostly in
| the capital that has traffic lights everywhere, and sitting
| at my desk now not looking at a traffic light, I wouldn't
| want to bet money on the order.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| It depends on their kind of colorblindness.
|
| I see green lights as white, which is fine most of the time
| because of the order.
|
| The exception is when there's a lot of glare from the sun
| setting behind me, and I sometimes can't tell if it's green,
| or just the sun reflecting at the right angle. It also washes
| out the red and yellow, making it harder to see if they're
| lit.
| nemetroid wrote:
| Horizontal lights are not consistent across countries. The
| linked article has an image of a Japanese horizontal traffic
| light with red on the right, whereas an American traffic
| light would have red on the left.
| lozenge wrote:
| And some countries don't have horizontal lights at all.
|
| https://youtu.be/sXbHdKJ1D78
| watwut wrote:
| Most color blind have issue to see shades and subtle
| differences. They see red and green just fine.
|
| The people who do not see red at all however, see red as
| black. So, they do not see red traffic light at all.
| hulitu wrote:
| > The order of the lights doesn't change.
|
| For 3 lights streetlights no. For 2 lights streetlights it
| depends. They can be (in DE) either red and yellow or yellow
| or green.
| Prcmaker wrote:
| I learned this lesson in my first ever public lecture.
| Approximately 10% of my audience had some form of colour
| blindness, rendering the majority of my figures incapable of
| communicating their intent.
|
| Since then I have rendered all figures for public consumption
| in black and white, and lines instead of surfaces where
| possible.
| twic wrote:
| The Reader's Digest article is just a mediocre summary of the
| Atlas Obscura one it links to:
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-green-traffic-li...
|
| Although the latter does contain a complete misrepresentation of
| what "grue" means.
|
| The explanation is still unsatisfying. Japan had green lights,
| referred to in law by a word which means blue but has
| traditionally encompassed green as well. Pedants pointed out that
| it would be better if the law explicitly said green. Rather than
| changing the law or letting things be, the government ordered
| lights be changed to blue-green. This is, on the face of it,
| completely insane behaviour, but neither article attempts to
| explain why the government did this.
| sylware wrote:
| ... and the original post is javascript-only browsers. It seems
| there is not a lot to be proud of here. Try again.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Huh, AO reads fine in w3m. Like many apparent JS-only
| websites (e.g. Medium), they seem to serve JS-free content if
| you pass a user agent that doesn't suggest JS-compatibility.
|
| https://www.marginalia.nu/junk/w3m-ao.png
| pzmarzly wrote:
| AO may not work for you, but OP's link to rd.com doesn't work
| for me - I'm getting some difficult captchas from cloudflare
| that don't let me visit that site.
| lopis wrote:
| For those that are as confused as me, in the comment above
| "ao" refers to "Atlas Obscura" not to blue in Japanese.
| second_brekkie wrote:
| Maybe Korea also had blue traffic lights in the past. But they
| still call green traffic lights 'blue' even though all of them
| use a green coloured light.
|
| I think the use of blue to mean both blue and green has also been
| present in Korea for a long time.
|
| I wonder where it came from? In my limited experience if Korea
| and Japan share something culturally it often has its common
| derivation in Chineese tradition.
| iopq wrote:
| Both come from the Chinese term Qing which in modern Chinese
| would by itself refer to colors anywhere between sky blue and
| grassy green
|
| Qing Tian - clear skies
|
| Qing Cao - green grass
|
| Qing Pu Tao - ceongpodo - white grape
| tnbp wrote:
| I used to wonder, as a kid, why most traffic lights in my region
| of Germany were red, orange-yellow and _obviously_ turquoise. I
| remember drawing traffic lights (I loved drawing road layouts
| when I was young) without any use for the green pen. Nowadays,
| they all seem to be very much green, at least the new LED ones.
| TylerE wrote:
| I'd say here in the US the LEDs skew much more blue than the
| incandeswnts they replace. Almost a teal.
| schappim wrote:
| TL;DR: The traditional Japanese language did not have separate
| words for green and blue; instead, it used a single term "Qing "
| (ao) to cover both colours. Over time, the language evolved, but
| the initial categorisation of green as a type of blue stuck
| around in certain contexts, like traffic signals. This linguistic
| trait led to the designation of traffic signals that are green in
| colour as "Qing Xin Hao " (ao shingou), which literally
| translates to "blue signal."
| dotancohen wrote:
| I believe that Greek, too, lacks a word for blue. Modern Greek
| speakers just use the English word blue as "mple" where "mp"
| stands in for the B sound which has no distinct letter in modern
| Greek.
| mgaunard wrote:
| They speak of this as if it was a Japan-only thing.
|
| The blue-green distinction is a late feature of most languages.
|
| Even Greek and Latin did not have as clear a distinction as we
| have today.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > They speak of this as if it was a Japan-only thing.
|
| Which other countries have blue traffic lights?
| iopq wrote:
| In China, for example, the word for green Lu is used for the
| light
|
| Lu is used in Japanese for the color of green tea, but they
| use Qing for the green light
|
| There's also Cui in Japanese to mean a bright green, which
| in Chinese also has a blue connotation (based on the color of
| the kingfisher who dives Cui to catch fish)
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| I'm not doubting that multiple languages have that aspect
| to it, but as far as I know that does not result in blue
| traffic lights. I have not heard of an instance of a blue
| traffic light in China to go with your Chinese example.
| himinlomax wrote:
| viridis / caeruleum
| realusername wrote:
| That's the same in Vietnamese as well, it's "xanh" for both.
| You have to add some extra precision if you really want to
| differentiate them.
| Taniwha wrote:
| what's interesting is that the chinese characters used for blue
| and green ended up being backwards between China and Japan
| PinguTS wrote:
| How do you come, that they had no distinction between blue and
| green?
|
| The Greek had no word for blue, which is the reason Homer
| described the sky with different words. But I never heard that
| the sky was green-isch.
|
| While on the other side the Greek had more similarities between
| green and yellow.
| wrp wrote:
| As mentioned, _aoi ringo_ (blue apple) is a common term. When I
| moved to Japan many years ago, on my first visit to a McDonald
| 's, I was initially excited then let down by the prospect of
| getting a "blue apple" milkshake.
| sleepy_keita wrote:
| This reminds me of when I took my drivers' license test in Japan
| -- they'll do an eye exam including whether you can recognize the
| colors. The first color was this weird mix between blue and
| green, and when the administrator asked me what color was
| showing, it took me a moment to try to find a word to describe
| the color... then I realized, I'm at the DMV, they want "ao", so
| that's what I said.
| yznlp wrote:
| 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.
| tdiggity wrote:
| as other comments have pointed out, this also happens with other
| east asian languages. vietnamese is another one.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Common, not a single mention of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
|
| https://www.verywellmind.com/the-sapir-whorf-hypothesis-7565...
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(page generated 2023-10-23 09:00 UTC)