{"id":5451,"date":"2012-08-16T13:39:48","date_gmt":"2012-08-16T13:39:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/?p=5451"},"modified":"2014-08-05T16:15:23","modified_gmt":"2014-08-05T16:15:23","slug":"sugarysnarks-the-crayola-fication-of-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/?p=5451","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-5451 gallery-columns-3 gallery-size-thumbnail'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/?attachment_id=5452#main'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" src=\"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/08\/tumblr_m7j9rwQnL01r42dfro1_500-150x150.jpg\" class=\"attachment-thumbnail size-thumbnail\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sugarysnarks.tumblr.com\/post\/29549286492\/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world-how-we-gave\" class=\"tumblr_blog\">sugarysnarks<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.empiricalzeal.com\/2012\/06\/05\/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-part-i\/\"><strong>The Crayola-fication of the World<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In Japan, people often refer to traffic lights as being blue in color. And this is a bit odd, because the traffic signal indicating \u2018go\u2019 in Japan is just as green as it is anywhere else in the world. So why is the color getting lost in translation? This visual conundrum has its roots in the history of language.<\/p>\n<p>Blue and green are similar in hue. They sit next to each other in a rainbow, which means that, to our eyes, light can blend smoothly from blue to green or vice-versa, without going past any other color in between. Before the modern period, Japanese had just one word,\u00a0<em>Ao<\/em>, for both blue and green. The wall that divides these colors hadn\u2019t been erected as yet.\u00a0As the language evolved, in the Heian period around the year 1000, something interesting happened. A new word popped into being \u2013<em>midori<\/em> \u2013 and it described a sort of greenish end of blue. Midori was a shade of ao, it wasn\u2019t really a new color in its own right.<\/p>\n<p>One of the first fences in this color continuum came from an unlikely place \u2013 crayons. In 1917, the first crayons were imported into Japan, and they brought with them a way of dividing a seamless visual spread into neat, discrete chunks. There were different crayons for green (midori) and blue (ao), and children started to adopt these names. But the real change came during the Allied occupation of Japan after World War II, when new educational material started to circulate. In 1951, teaching guidelines for first grade teachers distinguished blue from green, and the word midori was shoehorned to fit this new purpose.<\/p>\n<p>In modern Japanese, midori is the word for green, as distinct from blue.\u00a0This divorce of blue and green was not without its scars. There are clues that remain in the language, that bear witness to this awkward separation. For example, in many languages the word for vegetable is synonymous with green (sabzi in Urdu literally means green-ness, and in English we say \u2018eat your greens\u2019). But in Japanese, vegetables are ao-mono, literally blue things. Green apples? They\u2019re blue too. As are the first leaves of spring, if you go by their Japanese name. In English, the term green is sometimes used to describe a novice, someone inexperienced. In Japanese, they\u2019re ao-kusai, literally they \u2018smell of blue\u2019. It\u2019s as if the borders that separate colors follow a slightly different route in Japan.<\/p>\n<p>And it\u2019s not just Japanese. There are<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language\"> plenty of other languages<\/a> that blur the lines between what we call blue and green. Many languages don\u2019t distinguish between the two colors at all. In Vietnamese the Thai language,\u00a0<em>khiaw<\/em> means green except if it refers to the sky or the sea, in which case it\u2019s blue.\u00a0\u00a0The Korean word <em>purueda<\/em> could refer to either blue or green, and the same goes for the Chinese word <em>q\u012bng. <\/em>It\u2019s not just East Asian languages either, this is something you see <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language\">across language families<\/a>. In fact, Radiolab had a fascinating recent episode on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.radiolab.org\/2012\/may\/21\/\">color<\/a> where they talked about how there was no blue in the original Hebrew Bible, nor in all of Homer\u2019s Illiad or Odyssey!<\/p>\n<p><span>I find this fascinating, because it highlights a powerful idea about how we might see the world. After all,\u00a0<\/span>what really is a color? Just like the crayons, we\u2019re taking something that has no natural boundaries \u2013 the frequencies of visible light \u2013 and dividing into convenient packages that we give a name.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>This is absolutely fascinating. Language differences &lt;3<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>sugarysnarks: The Crayola-fication of the World How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains. In Japan, people often refer to traffic lights as being blue in color. And this is a bit odd, because the traffic signal indicating \u2018go\u2019 in Japan is just as green as it is anywhere else in the <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/?p=5451\">[&hellip;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-uncategorized","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5451"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5453,"href":"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5451\/revisions\/5453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tumblwise.cynwise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}