I have a private ESL student who is a 61 year old man. He wrote an essay about his favorite animals, and one of them was a tiger. He wrote that he loves their black and yellow stripes. I assumed it was a language error and wrote "orange?" above it when I was correcting it at home. During the lesson, I asked him about it, and he said, "No, yellow!" We got into a lighthearted debate about what color a tiger is and eventually agreed to disagree.
When I got to work at my office job, I asked my manager and other staff members, "What color is a tiger?" Every single person said "black and yellow".
I'm astonished. A tiger is objectively orange! It's obviously a cultural difference, but at the same time…WHAT?
I understand that Japanese people didn't used to have a word for "green", so there are still some things that are called blue despite being green. For example, 「青りんご」. Did they used to not have a word for "orange" either? They have 「橙色」now, but did they used to call orange things "yellow"? Even so, I'm pretty sure that if you asked a Japanese person, "What color is a sour apple?", they wouldn't say "blue".
So, why do they say tigers are yellow? I'm genuinely baffled.
Edit to add: I absolutely should not have assumed that it was just a Japan thing. Based on the comments, it's actually a lot of countries that say that tigers are yellow. So far there are more saying that than orange, so the US might actually be a minority in this case.
The list so far is as follows:
Orange
-US
-UK
-New Zealand
-Mexico
-Australia
-Finland
-France
-Israel
Yellow
-Japan
-Ukraine
-Germany
-The Netherlands
-Romania
-Norway
-Malaysia
Up for debate
-Italy (2 out of 3 people on this post say orange.)
-Sweden (A person on this post says yellow, but my Swedish friend says orange.)
by badgicorn