Blue fruit, the origins of Ao

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takenoko
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Blue fruit, the origins of Ao

Post by takenoko »

So something that's often mistranslated is Aoi 青い/蒼い. Normally it just means "blue". But when used to talk about traffic lights, fruit, and grass, it means "green".

If you look up the kanji in a Chinese dictionary, it'll mostly say "green" (with some blue?). So it's easy to think, "Oh, Japanese is derived from Chinese characters, this is probably some lost in translation thing."

But maybe it's symptomatic of something bigger than that? So I recently listened to the Radiolab podcast about colors http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/

And there was a whole section devoted to the color blue http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/
To summarize, Homer from the Odyssey and stuff like that never used the word (or rarely did?). The same could be said about many of his contemporaries. Apparently, in human language, the first colors always tend to be black, white, then red... and blue almost always ended up being the last word form. Why? Were ancient people just colorblind? One theory they proposed was that blue didn't occur in nature very often. Or that it was a difficult color for humans to make.

But what about the sky, right? So they did this test on some tribe somewhere that didn't have the word for "blue" in their language. They were tested for color blindness, then shown some green colors and a blue color, and they couldn't spot the blue. One guy asked his kid what color the sky was, and she'd say stuff like "white", eventually sorta saying "blue" but only after a few months.
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Re: Blue fruit, the origins of Ao

Post by Monkeyjb1988 »

I read somewhere once something almost like your post, but the experiment is new. I guess it's perception. Thanks for sharing :)
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Re: Blue fruit, the origins of Ao

Post by Kogashi »

Thank you so much for bringing this up. I have been looking for this topic for ages. Heard it on the radio when it aired or during a repeat but never got around to looking for it specifically... Also yes it's a very interesting examination of the evolution of language/cultures.
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Re: Blue fruit, the origins of Ao

Post by Catastrophe »

My confusion from the Den O trilogy is now cleared up.
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