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Comment by guidopallemans | Hacker News Reader

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guidopallemans·

> most people acknowledge that there is a color between blue and green

For many people, there is no difference between blue and green at all!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...

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>For many people, there is no difference between blue and green at all!

That's sorta not true, it's just a quirk of language development. If they only have one word that covers both, they use additional words to describe the actual shade they're talking about.

Of these, the only language that I know a bit about, in Chinese 青 (blue/green) is the older word and nowadays used less than the more modern 蓝 (blue) and 绿 (green), but actually 青 is still used a lot in specific phrases, and I prefer to think of it as the "colour of things in nature" - so a blue sky would be 青, a blue/green sea would be 青 and a field of lush grass would also be 青. That aspect also comes through in how it's used metaphorically, in the senses of youth or vitality.

This is the same character that's used for Japanese traffic lights when foreigners find it funny that they call obviously green lights "blue".

Fun fact: Japan's traffic lights actually do use a blue-green color; it's not the same green that most countries use. ("In 1973, the government mandated through a cabinet order that traffic lights use the bluest shade of green possible—still technically green, but noticeably blue enough to justifiably continue using the ao nomenclature.")

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japan-green-traffic-li...

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