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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

Well the “chart decreasing” emoji is blue. So that whole thing about Japanese stock exchange is wrong…

If these colour meanings are older than ~80 years (presumably they are), then maybe the association is between aka (red) for increases and ao (grue) for decreases, or in English, both green and blue for decreases.

Are you sure? The Japanese conflate blue and green all the time.

It depends on the font. Some fonts have it in red, some in blue, some in green, some in orange. I think it's reasonable to think that cultural differences played a part in the variety of colours used by different fonts.

They seem to be gravitating towards blue (specifically, the colour most westerners consider blue), though.

https://emojipedia.org/chart-decreasing/

"...the colour most westerners consider blue" - are your saying this because they have a different word for blue in other countries or because there is some sort of dispute over what is considered blue?

Neither, it's because of a (mainly) East Asian concept of "grue" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...). This is also the reason why the Japanese traffic lights has the "bluest green" (according to the Japanese government) in use today (https://www.rd.com/article/heres-japan-blue-traffic-lights/).

P.S. Russians have a different problem with blue: there's no singular word that maps to the English "blue" (they have синий (siniy, darker shades of blue) and голубой (goluboy, lighter shades of blue)). To be fair, English has the reds going on here: there's pink (in some languages substituted with the local equivalent of "rose") and maroon (which is just replaced with "dark red", and is a worst offender since that the French uses it for brown!)

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