Comment by Jeremy1026
2 years ago
It's very cultural. For example, Japan used the same word for green and blue, so their green light on traffic lights is as blue as possible while conforming to international standards for the light to be "green".
Also, there is a pretty well done video by Vox on how color names are influenced by culture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg
I think this might be a bit overblown. "why do we call it blue signal?" is a common 3-5 years old question in Japan.
Old Japanese traffic signals had blue tinted lenses, like ultramarine blue. Those lenses were used in conjunction with warm yellow incandescent lamps, technology available at the time. Deep blue + warm yellow = green.
Over time the green color must have normalized, without laws and slogans not reflecting that. And nowadays they're green LEDs.
The blue-green distinction is something that tends to come late in most or maybe all language families. Ancient Greek also used the same word for blue and green. As I recall, the first color words a language gains are black and white, followed by red. Blue-green is one of the last distinctions made.
This has begun to happen in the UK as well, and I'm struggling to get anyone else to see it. Traffic lights installed in the past couple of years seem to use a new style of LED that emits a turquoise light instead of green. I took a picture and looked at the RGB value and the G/B were equal. Everyone else I ask says they still look green. Here's an example: https://static.independent.co.uk/2022/04/22/00/21135757-1ac1...
Not just Japanese - many languages use the same word for "green" and "blue". Linguists call it "grue".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
E.g. the Vietnamese word xanh means "grue", and to distinguish between green and blue you say "sky xanh" or "leaf xany".
Thank gods at least red is red.
In all rulebooks, lights are red-yellow-green, but in many places, I can see red-amber-turquoise. Now a sure way to get a traffic police officer livid is to call the yellow light “amber” or “orange”…
My friend got a "Running an Amber" ticket when we were teens outside metro Detroit, MI. I had never heard it called that color before but that small memory is always on my mind when the light changes as I'm crossing.
In the UK, the yellow light is officially an "amber" light in terms of driver regulations and statutes, such that some anally retentive type is always bound to correct anyone who dares say "yellow".
It's orange in french
In Greek too.