i heard traffic lights used to actually be blue before they were forced to change by international standards, and they still only went with the shade of green closest to blue while still legally being green
I’ve had Japanese friends explain it to me that where 青 ends and 緑 starts is different than in English. So Midori is more for a very specific forest green and Ao extends into lots of light green shades like Granny Smith apples or traffic lights
If i remember right, I’m pretty sure its a language history thing. “Blue” originally covered green bc there just wasn’t a word for green until later, so some words/phrases involving green still use “blue”. I think it may also depend on the shade of green, too. Interestingly, this is a very common phenomenon in the history of many languages. Blue tends to be one of the first colors to get a word.
Languages tend to evolve color words in a specific order. Most start with black and white, then add red. Green usually comes much later.
It’s why Homer keeps referring to the “wine-dark sea” in The Iliad and The Odyssey – Greek didn’t have a word for blue back then.
I learned that people in the 平安(Heian) era couldn’t tell the difference between blue and green, so they called them both ao. So even now green is sometimes called ao.
Originally, blue and green used the same word ao. Actually, red was also often used for yellow, for example the sun was described as red. This suggest that old Japanese probably distinguished between warm and cool colours, dark and light, instead of blue, green, yellow, red, etc.
I’m Korean and Korea also describe blue as green. We call ‘blue light’ and ‘blue apple’ too. I don’t know how China does but I think that countries which use Chinese character call blue as same as green.
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This article explains the history:
https://cotoacademy.com/japanese-color-blue-green-aoi-midori-%E9%9D%92%E3%81%84-%E3%81%BF%E3%81%A9%E3%82%8A/
i heard traffic lights used to actually be blue before they were forced to change by international standards, and they still only went with the shade of green closest to blue while still legally being green
I’ve had Japanese friends explain it to me that where 青 ends and 緑 starts is different than in English. So Midori is more for a very specific forest green and Ao extends into lots of light green shades like Granny Smith apples or traffic lights
If i remember right, I’m pretty sure its a language history thing. “Blue” originally covered green bc there just wasn’t a word for green until later, so some words/phrases involving green still use “blue”. I think it may also depend on the shade of green, too.
Interestingly, this is a very common phenomenon in the history of many languages. Blue tends to be one of the first colors to get a word.
Languages tend to evolve color words in a specific order. Most start with black and white, then add red. Green usually comes much later.
It’s why Homer keeps referring to the “wine-dark sea” in The Iliad and The Odyssey – Greek didn’t have a word for blue back then.
There‘s a similar 蓝/青 split in Chinese.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/211119-colors
I learned that people in the 平安(Heian) era couldn’t tell the difference between blue and green, so they called them both ao. So even now green is sometimes called ao.
Originally, blue and green used the same word ao. Actually, red was also often used for yellow, for example the sun was described as red. This suggest that old Japanese probably distinguished between warm and cool colours, dark and light, instead of blue, green, yellow, red, etc.
I’m Korean and Korea also describe blue as green. We call ‘blue light’ and ‘blue apple’ too. I don’t know how China does but I think that countries which use Chinese character call blue as same as green.
It’s because of the famous Japanese sayings.
よりどり青い
and
隣の芝生は緑ですね