The missing piece might be the tendency to skew towards the protoypical. So just as Japanese children draw the sun as red where American kids reach for a yellow crayon, the prototypical "go" color for a Japanese speaker is going to be blue - so even though it's not exactly the same color, "blue" means "go". If you're interested in the lack of green/blue distinction in Japanese, there's a classic study by Berlin and Kay from 1969 that established that basic color terms are added to languages in fixed ways, so that (among other things) a language with four color terms will never have a distinct word for green. The wikipedia article on color terms<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms>has a pretty good summary, and the paper is not hard to find if you're interested. It's worth reading - but beware, as you might imagine this area a real trap for the curious.
On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 8:40 AM, Fabrizio Giudici < [email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:33:12 +0100, Dan Stine <[email protected]> wrote: > > "Why does Jenkins have blue balls?" >> >> http://jenkins-ci.org/node/377 >> > > This is very interesting, even though I think the article fails to give a > full explanation. So, for japanese people green is just a shade of blue and > there was a short time in which japanese traffic lights had blue in place > of green. Ok. So what? Japanese traffic lights nowadays are green anyway > and I understand they already were when Kohsuke was born... so the traffic > light paradigm was that-shade-of-blue-that-**others-call-green/yellow/red, > not blue/yellow/red... What am I missing here? > > > -- > Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect @ Tidalwave s.a.s. > "We make Java work. Everywhere." > http://tidalwave.it/fabrizio/**blog <http://tidalwave.it/fabrizio/blog> - > [email protected] > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Java Posse" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to > javaposse+unsubscribe@**googlegroups.com<javaposse%[email protected]> > . > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/**group/javaposse?hl=en<http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en> > . > For more options, visit > https://groups.google.com/**groups/opt_out<https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out> > . > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java Posse" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
