imdat celeste :v_nb: :v_tg: on Nostr: This is just too funny to leave out ( nprofile1q…nqa9y ) - I really LOVE this one: ...
This is just too funny to leave out ( nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqwjkcutp4g4g20zuelq6pulyfpmctwtau8l9dct0pg6rltjpwlemqanqa9y (nprofile…qa9y) ) - I really LOVE this one:
“VISITORS TO JAPAN in possession of a sharp eye might notice something unusual about the colour of some traffic lights. Not that there is anything odd about the basic scheme: just like everywhere else, the red light in Japan means ‘stop’, green is for ‘go’, and an orange light appears in between. But those who take a good look will see that the green lights are a different shade of green from that of other countries, and have a distinct bluish tint. The reason why is not an Oriental superstition about the protective powers of turquoise or a spillage of blue toner in a Japanese plastic factory, but a bizarre twist of linguistic-political history.
Japanese used to have a colour word, ao, that spanned both green and blue. In the modern language, however, ao has come to be restricted mostly to blue shades, and green is usually expressed by the word midori (although even today ao can still refer to the green of freshness or unripeness – green apples, for instance, are called ao ringo). When the first traffic lights were imported from the United States and installed in Japan in the 1930s, they were just as green as anywhere else. Nevertheless, in common parlance the go light was dubbed ao shingoo, perhaps because the three primary colours on Japanese artists’ palettes are traditionally aka (red), kiiro (yellow), and ao. The label ao for a green light did not appear so out of the ordinary at first, because of the remaining associations of the word ao with greenness. But over time, the discrepancy between the green colour and the dominant meaning of the word ao began to feel jarring. Nations with a weaker spine might have opted for the feeble solution of simply changing the official name of the go light to midori. Not so the Japanese. Rather than alter the name to fit reality, the Japanese government decreed in 1973 that reality should be altered to fit the name: henceforth, go lights would be a colour that better corresponded to the dominant meaning of ao. Alas, it was impossible to change the colour to real blue, because Japan is party to an international convention that ensures road signs have a measure of uniformity around the globe. The solution was thus to make the ao light as bluish as possible while still being officially green (see figure 7 in the Plate Section).
The turquoising of the traffic light in Japan is a rather out-of-the-way example of how the quirks of a language can change reality and thus affect what people get to see in the world. But of course this is not the kind of influence of language that we have been concerned with in the previous few chapters. Our question is whether speakers of different languages might perceive the same reality in different ways, just because of their mother tongues. Are the colour concepts of our language a lens through which we experience colours in the world?”
Excerpt From "Through the Language Glass" by Guy Deutscher
#Language
“VISITORS TO JAPAN in possession of a sharp eye might notice something unusual about the colour of some traffic lights. Not that there is anything odd about the basic scheme: just like everywhere else, the red light in Japan means ‘stop’, green is for ‘go’, and an orange light appears in between. But those who take a good look will see that the green lights are a different shade of green from that of other countries, and have a distinct bluish tint. The reason why is not an Oriental superstition about the protective powers of turquoise or a spillage of blue toner in a Japanese plastic factory, but a bizarre twist of linguistic-political history.
Japanese used to have a colour word, ao, that spanned both green and blue. In the modern language, however, ao has come to be restricted mostly to blue shades, and green is usually expressed by the word midori (although even today ao can still refer to the green of freshness or unripeness – green apples, for instance, are called ao ringo). When the first traffic lights were imported from the United States and installed in Japan in the 1930s, they were just as green as anywhere else. Nevertheless, in common parlance the go light was dubbed ao shingoo, perhaps because the three primary colours on Japanese artists’ palettes are traditionally aka (red), kiiro (yellow), and ao. The label ao for a green light did not appear so out of the ordinary at first, because of the remaining associations of the word ao with greenness. But over time, the discrepancy between the green colour and the dominant meaning of the word ao began to feel jarring. Nations with a weaker spine might have opted for the feeble solution of simply changing the official name of the go light to midori. Not so the Japanese. Rather than alter the name to fit reality, the Japanese government decreed in 1973 that reality should be altered to fit the name: henceforth, go lights would be a colour that better corresponded to the dominant meaning of ao. Alas, it was impossible to change the colour to real blue, because Japan is party to an international convention that ensures road signs have a measure of uniformity around the globe. The solution was thus to make the ao light as bluish as possible while still being officially green (see figure 7 in the Plate Section).
The turquoising of the traffic light in Japan is a rather out-of-the-way example of how the quirks of a language can change reality and thus affect what people get to see in the world. But of course this is not the kind of influence of language that we have been concerned with in the previous few chapters. Our question is whether speakers of different languages might perceive the same reality in different ways, just because of their mother tongues. Are the colour concepts of our language a lens through which we experience colours in the world?”
Excerpt From "Through the Language Glass" by Guy Deutscher
#Language