Do you know why traffic lights are blue and not green in Japan?

If you have ever been to Japan or seen films shot there, you probably noticed that the traffic lights in this country are different from those that can be found in other states. They have red and yellow colors in place, but instead of green - blue.

Why is that? Well, here you have to turn to the peculiarities of Japanese linguistics. The fact is that in the language of this country at first there was no adjective describing the color green at all. There was only the word aoi (青い), and it was used for all cool shades - emerald, blue, cyan and so on.

There is nothing special about this: many peoples confused these colors. For example, in Homer's Iliad, the modern Himba people of Namibia did not have special words for blue.

There is even a conspiracy theory on the Internet that in ancient times people were a kind of color blind and did not see the difference between blue and green. However, a linguist and author of the book Through the Mirror of Language. Why does the world look different in other languages" Guy Deutscher

installed, it is not so.

He conducted an experiment on his own daughter - until a certain age, he never talked to her about the color blue, until one day he asked what shade the sky was. At first the girl answered that she was white. But later, when she learned the appropriate words, she began to call him blue.

Deutscher realized that both modern and ancient people perceived colors in the same way, only they did not always have suitable concepts for referring to specific shades.

Biology is the same for everyone, but linguistics and culture influence the perception of the world. Blue color is rare in nature. Therefore, for many peoples who did not have access to bright dyes like indigo, there was simply no need enter separate words for it.

Civilization Japanese was rather isolated, and for a long time they enjoyed the word aoi (青い), which was used to refer to both blue and green. Later, the Japanese invented a separate concept of midori (緑) for the latter. But still they continued to call aoi both green and blue - just the old fashioned way.

And because of this happened confusion. Traffic lights were first installed in Japan in the 1930s - the usual ones are: red, yellow, green. But the Japanese always called the corresponding signal aoi, not midori.

As a result, in 1973, the government of Japan, by order of the Cabinet of Ministers obligated when making traffic lights, use a blue tint. That is, the tradition of calling the word aoi both colors is so rooted in the culture of the Japanese that it turned out it's easier to install special traffic lights on the streets than to force them to stop calling one color others.