Words Affect Our Reality - On The Right

The Whorf hypothesis claims that one's native language influences perception and thought. Researchers at UC-Berkeley and U-Chicago reasoned that, since language is predominantly processed in the left hemisphere of the brain, any effect on perception should have an effect predominantly on the right visual field, which is also processed on the left. After comparing reaction times for hues of blue-green -- colors with distinct names in one language but not another -- they concluded, in a just-published paper, that the Whorf hypothesis holds for the right visual field, but not the left.

Comments

You learn something new every day.

[TripMaster Monkey]

And all this time I thought the Worf hypothesis was just "Today is a good day to die.".

...the Whorf hypothesis holds for the right visual field, but not the left.

Apparently the left visual field is "without honor".

Re:You learn something new every day.

[Gzip Christ]

And all this time I thought the Worf hypothesis was just "Today is a good day to die.".

Don't be ridiculous - that's the Worf axiom.

bi -lingual ??

[wesw02]

What if one is Bi-Lingual natively?

Re:bi -lingual ??

[lbmouse]

Bi-lingual?

Then you are either a cunnilingus or a cunning linguist.

Re:bi -lingual ??

[greginnj]

Nali taka? Ne e vazmozhno! Zhena mi e syshto Bulgarka!

Our situation is even weirder; we met in France -- so we still speak French to each other. I speak English to the kids and she speaks Bulgarian to them (sometimes) and English sometimes. The kids are starting to pick up the French as well as the English and the Bulgarian. (Their Bulgarian gets more active after they spend the summer there.)

The one principle we decided on very early was -- Complete Sentences Only! Either a full sentence in English, or a full sentence in French, or in Bulgarian -- no mixing languages. This way, we prevent corrupting the kids' grammar, let alone our own. I've heard stories that Turkish children growing up in Germany who end up speaking and hearing a mishmash of the two languages end up being fluent in neither -- and could be said to have no native language of their own.

Do skoro!

Re:bi -lingual ??

[Knuckles]

Maybe another data point that helps. Someone I know is the daughter of an EU diplomat who has followed his frequent relocations. Being a diplomat's daughter, the schools she went to were good. She speaks German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian roughly equally well, i.e. fluently.

She says that she feels to have no first language in which whe is completely competent and "home", and that this sucks. She feels that there is no one language in which she can express herself completely.
Now, that might be a subjective feeling that not necessarily goes away if one does not have her "problem". I only speak German (first language) and English, and I surely don't feel completely competent in German, nor can I express myself "completely". One might even argue that if this was even possible, we would not have such a big body of adventurous poetry and prose in mature languages that over course of centuries tried ever new ways to express oneself "completely".
That said, I think I can see her point.

Questioned on the language she thinks in, she says that it depends on the language in which she first encountered a given topic or spent a lot of time to think about it. So, she thinks about relationship/"love" stuff in Spanish because she spent her first puberty years in Spain. And she thinks about professional problems in French because she studied mostly in France.

I always liked the reverse Whorf hypothesis..

[jcr]

I'm convinced that the Eskimos settled in the Arctic, because they had so many different words for "snow".

-jcr

Re:I always liked the reverse Whorf hypothesis..

[mopslik]

Of course, some of us have heard that this "large number of words for snow" story is somewhat misleading.

Huhu almost

[stonecypher]

It's actually called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, because it was primarily Edward Sapir's work.

Oh please oh please oh please oh please...

[Cranky Weasel]

...may the barrage of bad Star Trek jokes be peppered with the occasional enlightening, thoughtful tidbit...

The Whorf hypothisis?

[Cro Magnon]

Sorry, but a Klingon warrior knows as much about language as a pointy-eared Vulcan does about child care.

There was a similar study.

[OneBigWord]

I remember a similar study where a culture with only four words for colors could still distinguish different 'English' colors. It doesn't seem too surprising that it may take them a little longer.

Re:There was a similar study.

[lawpoop]

The human eye can distinguish millions of colors. This is true regardless of color names in a language.

You might be thinking of _Basic Color Terms_, or one of the studies used to counter it. _Basic Color Terms_ was an interesting anthropological and historical theory. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay looked at anthropological data and classical literature and came up with the theory that there are only 11 basic color categories in language. So for instance, if you hear that a tribe has only 6 different color words, they could tell you exactly what they are.

There are a lot of studies that either supported or offered evidence against this theory. It's pretty interesting, IMHO.

FWIW, here are the colors:

1. Dark (or black, if you have 3 or more colors)
2. Light (or white, if you have more than 3 colors)
3. Red
4. Yellow or Green (pick one)
5. Yellow or Green (pick whichever you didn't pick above)
6. Blue
7. brown
8. purple
9. pink
10. orange
11. gray

The thing about their theory is that you have the colors in this order. So if your tribe has two color words, they are dark and light. If you have 4 words, they are black, white, red, and either yellow or green.

Berlin and Kay went into depth describing exactly what counted as a color. For instance, a descriptive word that applies solely to an object or material, such as copper, was discluded ( I think there as usage from Homer that Berlin and Kay discluded ). There was an ethnography where an anthropolgist tried to use a descriptive term for the color of a green plant to describe a green dress. The people he was with only had black, white and red; they held that the term he was using could only be applied to that particular plant. The anthropologist thought it was a general term for green, but no, it only applied to a particular plant species, not any plant, nor any other green thing.

Re:There was a similar study.

[Valdrax]

I already know of two languages that doesn't follow this order -- Japanese and the language mentioned in the article, Tarahumara. Much like Tarahumara, Japanese has a word that covers both blue and green (aoi). However, Japanese also has a word that covers just green (midori).

However, Japanese has had words for brown, purple, and several different words for grey but not distinct words for orange and pink (I'm ignoring X-iro words which mean "color of X" like momoiro for the color of peaches or oranjiiro for the color of oranges). It is interesting though that (gosai) means "the five colors" -- black, white, red, yellow, and green/blue.

It is interesting to note that in my limited experience is seems that the more civilized and thus artistic a culture becomes, the more words for colors they invent or co-opt.

Oh no...

[the_demiurge]

If language does have such a profound effect on our thought processes, does this mean the Time Cube guy is right, and "Teachers are hired evil word pedants who enslave childish minds to a lifetime stupidity."?

Are we really "educated as a stupid android slave to the evil Word Animal Singularity Brotherhood"?

I'm scared. :-(

But what. . .

[smooth wombat]

if I pass the dutchie on the left-hand side? What then?

implications

[rodentia]

This is a really outstanding result and leads to some interesting new territory. It would seem that there may well be two (or more?) discrete cognitive processes mediating reality for mind. Another blow to the idea of a comprehensive, unitary consciousness and the corresponding myth of a radical alterity labelled unconscious.

Childhood learning...

[hhr]

I wonder if this is like native asians and the letters 'r' and 'l'-- if you don't learn the difference when you are young then your brain will have problems thinking that way.

If so, it would mean that it's not the language that causes you to think differently, but a seperate skill that you also use to speak the language. In this case of the Tarahumara speakers, it's distinquishing green and blue. They never needed to do so, so now they have problems when tested for it.

Conclusions Sound?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The researchers found that participants responded more quickly when the color of the odd-man-out had a different name than the color of the other squares -- as if the linguistic difference had heightened the perceptual difference -- but this only occurred if the odd-man-out was in the right half of the visual field, and not when it was in the left half. This was the predicted pattern.

The conclusions seem sound. The experiment even proved its aim that only the left half of the brain shows a difference. As the article mentions, the linguistic distinction seems to heighten the left hemisphere's ability to distinguish the actual color distinction. But does this show a fundamental difference in thought processes, or simply a type of learned response.

For example, imagine an experiment whereby you walk down the street wearing a T-shirt with a CCCP logo on it. Most people born after say, 1980 might not even bat an eyelid. Someone who grew up amid the 50's red scare, practicing taking shelter under their school desk, might suddenly find their eye transfixed on the logo, their heart rate increasing, and a sudden urge to duck beneath the nearest school desk.

So does something similar occur when you've been taught your whole life that blue and green are different colors, verses say, being told that green was just a kind of yellowy blue?

Neurolinguistic oversimplification?

[Floody]

I believe this is somewhat of a simplification. It may be applicable in terms of auditory perception and processing, but as everyone knows, language is much more than the sum of individual words.

Neurolinguistic events are examples of associative cascade events. This is illustrated by the classic example: "Don't think of an elephant." Immediately after reading and comprehending the linguistic elements of the sentence, each and every reader of this post made the applicable associative connections resulting in the contemplation (even if minor and short-lived) of one of our long-nosed pachyderm friends. Even if it was understood that the instruction was not to make the association, by the time this level of awareness was achieved, the cascade was already in progress and unstoppable.

The context of such associative cascades (especially more sophisticated varieties) is largely cultural; however the portions of the brain most likely to respond is based on each association in the chain and its relative contextual weight, rather than the phonetics of the original sound itself.

Lyrical forms of linguistics, such as poetry and song, are particularly powerful because they offer a way to rapidly trigger abstract associations not related to logic, speech or visual images.

Re:The image file

[kfg]

Because their language set includes JPG, but does not include PNG or SVG.

KFG

Sapir Whorf is BS

[lawpoop]

There's no way that Sapir Whorf can be true. If it were, that means that, just off the top of my head, we couldn't lie, entertain theoretical possibilities, hear two sides of the same event, understand that we were misinformed earlier but have correct information now, tell a fictional story, etc.

Stephen Pinker does a good job of debunking Sapir Whorf in _The Language Instinct_. The classic examples of the number of Eskimo words for snow is actually not true -- Inuit language has a lot of suffixes, but there are only a few different root words for snow. English has about as many root words for snow.

The other example was factory workers or something who mistakenly disposed of cigarette butts in 'empty' barrels that were actually full of flammable fumes. Well, the workers weren't fooled by language; there were fooled by invisible fumes. An empty barrel looks exactly like one full of fumes.

Re:Sapir Whorf is BS

[turangalila]

Yes, Steven Pinker is excellent on this. The other example I remember him pointing is the German word Schadenfreude (the malicious satisfaction obtained from the misfortune of others). There is no Engligh word for that, but that doesn't mean English speakers don't know what that is or have no feelings like that. If you find and English speaker who doesn't know what Schadenfreude means, and you tell them, a likely response might be - "Cool, there's actually a word for that?!"

Re:Sapir Whorf is BS

[angelatlarge]

I think the strong form of Sapir-Whorf is generally taken to be that - too strong. However, Steven Pinker is not the only authority on the subject, and there are plenty of smart people who think that there is something to the weaker form of this (something like "the categories present in the speaker's native language must be attended to by the speaker"). This would mean that you can, in fact, learn concepts like "schadenfreude" but also if concepts like "schadenfreude" are present in your language you are probably more attuned to them. Which is what the study demonstrates, I think.

This is easier to talk about with more "differing" concepts (rathen than simply presence/absence of a lexical item, such as "schadenfreude", like absolute (north-south) directions versus relative (left-right). This http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/jlin.1 993.3.1.3 is a link to an article about a speaker of an absolute direction-language modifying his gestures showing how the boat capsized based on his (the speaker's) position at the time of the telling. The storyteller always used the correct ABSOLUTE gesture showing the flip (say, along the east-west axis): something that's hard (for me, at least) to imagine a speaker of English doing.

Re:Sapir Whorf is BS

[g2devi]

Have a look at this link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3582794.stm

It's a concrete example how language limits what an Amazonian tribe can understand and how it limits what they are able to do.

Re:Sapir Whorf is BS

[radtea]

This would mean that you can, in fact, learn concepts like "schadenfreude" but also if concepts like "schadenfreude" are present in your language you are probably more attuned to them..

Which is so weak as to be completely uninteresting because it is completely obvious. It is only by the introduction of the strong form of the S-W hypothesis that anyone ever gets any heat in this debate, and yet at the end of the day everyone (sane) agrees that the strong form is trivially wrong.

The whole Sapir-Worf debate is nothing but one big intellectual bait-and-switch. I wish "advocates" of S-W would be honest, and preface their statements with, "I'm not defending the strong form of S-W, which everyone knows to be trivially wrong, but the weak form, which everyone knows to be trivially obvious." Then everyone can throw muffins at them for introducing a completely uninteresting topic of conversation--who wants to talk about something everyone agrees is true?

Re:Sapir Whorf is BS

[g2devi]

But how much of a special case is it? Our language has a word for the concept of "one more", and so we're capable of expressing the concept of counting in words, and thus arithmetic.

Apparently it's possible to teach 3rd and 4th grade students about binary arithmetic just by asking directed questions:
              http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html
The class already knew the concept of binary arithmetic, they just didn't know how to express it.

This tribe should already understand binary concepts (zero or many), at first glance, it should be possible to teach them binary arithmetic. The problem is, since there is no way to express that 11 and 111 are different, or how to convert one to the other (just "add one") and thus we can't teach them to count.

What I think Whorf was trying to say is that words are the way our minds can express and understand concepts. If we don't have a word, but we can express a concept in a language, then the language we use doesn't limit us. For example, we may not have a single word that can express the concept of "wet slushy snow with ice crystals", but since we have a string of words that can do it, we can still express our ideas. The problem comes when we have a concept that we can't put into words no matter how many words we string together. Because we don't have words for it, the concept cannot be related to other concepts or use as a basis for our thoughts. In mathematical terms, they are the "basis" in a vector space. The concepts we think about is limitted by the span of this vector space. Anything outside this vector space span are inaccessible to us, in much the same way that the third dimension is inaccessible to a flatlander. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland )

Re:Sapir Whorf is BS

[lawpoop]

"What I think Whorf was trying to say is that words are the way our minds can express and understand concepts. If we don't have a word, but we can express a concept in a language, then the language we use doesn't limit us."

You are right on both counts. What you are missing is that Whorf disagrees with your second sentence -- Whorf would say that language *limits* our expressive ability. Most linguists would argue that language *enables* expression. If there is a concept that we don't have a word or phrase for, we can build it out of lanauge. That's the critical difference. Whorf would have you believe that if it isn't in the dictionary, you aren't aware of it.

Re:Sapir Whorf is BS

[angelatlarge]

Disclaimer: I am really an expert in spatial cognition, yadda-yadda yadda, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

The easy question first:
> describe their orientation as upwards, downwards, etc
> Got any info on that?

I think Stephen C. Levinson (perhaps with Penelope Brown) working on Tenejapa Tzeltal argued that there is only the Uphill/Downhill/Side in that language. This seems to be specific to the Tenejapa variant, presumably having something to do with the locale there. I've been working on Petalcingo Tzeltal and have not come across this, but that may not mean much - I really did not investigate it, it is too complicated ;)

> What if you ask the absolute direction-language guy,
> With which hand do you throw a spear?"?
Hmmmm... I don't _really_ know, but I could speculate. If the language really only has cardinal reference, then possible answers might be "THIS hand" (if the interlocutor is visible) and "The one currently north/south and I am facing east/west" though this last one seems silly. There is an interesting typological question as to whether there are ANY languages that have ONLY cardinal reference and nothing else - I really don't know the answer, but it seems unlikely. I think usually there are different modalities available for different tasks: absolute for open spaces and large distances, perhaps relative or body-part analogy ("the coke bottle is at the foot of the table") for proximate locations. So my coke bottle example in a previous post is a bit unfortunate in that respect - perhaps a house and a tree would be better.
So clearly there are languages where the cardinal reference is PRIMARY (at least for certain tasks), but that is different.

What have we missed because of our language?

[KingFeanor]

I don't find it surprising that our language constructs limit or expand our perceptions of reality. What worries me though is how little language an average American knows. Having worked many jobs over the years, I have been repeatedly struck by how limited in linguistical skills and vocabulary most people are. The average English speaking American seems to use the same words over and over to mean different things.

I wonder how many discoveries we have missed because our language constrains us away from thinking about certain things. If we had more words and thus more distinctions for fundamental ideas and objects, we would very likely have greater understanding and regard for those things. I am reminded of how the Greek language differentiated between several types of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love love and whereas the English language does not. Because of the linguistic distinctions, the Greeks appeared to have a greater understanding of the concept of love than we do in America. Mix this limitation of the English language with the generally minuscule vocabulary of individuals and it isn't surprising that we Americans are so simple minded.

This reminds me of a saying...

[vertinox]

"It is easy problem to learn the things we do not know. The harder problem is trying know things that we do not know that we do not know."

Personally, I wonder if I am limited by the English language to thoughts I wish to express. Maybe my mind is a computer, the neurons the cpu, my memories is the hard drive storage, but my language is the OS.

However, what if I have Qbasic for DOS for my speaking language? No matter how powerful my brain is, I can't use this to create say "Doom 4" though expression for the mind. I'd need a specialized C++ compiler that optimized neurons in such a pattern to acheive this.

What if that language doesn't exist yet? Is it possible that my brain could have thoughts and emotions, but can't because I can't use language to express them.

On the bright side, English is a quickly mutating bastard language which seems fairly evolvable but sometimes I wonder if I should learn Japanese, Russian, or German and then end up with a new outlook on life.

Re:This reminds me of a saying...

[SchrodingersRoot]

Something like this was in the novella Gulf, by Robert Heinlein.
Not to spoil anything, but superintelligent people were learned and used a language that was much more compact, expressive, nuanced, and abstract than previously, so they could communicate faster and with more precision, as well as think more quickly and more abstractly.

And now for something totally different

[softweyr]

I wonder if I should learn Japanese, Russian, or German and then end up with a new outlook on life

Why settle for mundane utility languages? Learn Navajo or Swahili or Inuit, then design a programming language based on the linguistic concepts and world view you've now acquired. A Navajo-based computing language would be interesting, it would perhaps specialize in calculating only that which is actually worth calculating. Of course such a language would completely eliminiate Slashdot from existence.

Hmm

[TrevorB]

I find this interesting, because at the age of four, I was legally blind in my right eye. There was no damage, the eye was just dramaticly lazy, and incredibly far sighted. The correction was so strong that without my glasses I could barely see a foot square letter 10 feet away. My left eye, at the time was perfectly normal.

Years of patching have brought my right eye very close to normal. With time my left has drifted into near sightedness, leaving me nearsighted in my left eye and farsighted in my right.

However even now my vision is almost exclusively left eyed. My perceived field of vision is biased towards my left, making me turn my head slightly to my right to "face" someone. The information from my right eye is there, it just feels a lot like peripheral vision. I read exclusively with my left eye. My brain actually has data from both eyes, but has difficulty co-ordinating them. Sometimes it uses the double vision to judge distance, but other times, my brain seems pretty good at shutting down the right-eye image when I'm reading. This is all done subconciously, I don't realize I'm doing it a lot of the time.

I'm still trying to figure out exactly what this would mean related to this article. That I'm unbiased by language? That I'm a wishy washy pinko liberal? I'd like to think that this means my perception of the world is unbiased. More than likely all of these explanations are absolute junk.

(See, I can't make up my mind. :)

Side note: Of course with eye problems like this we've watched very carefully for eye problems in our own children. Our oldest's eyes are fine, but my youngest daughter is very farsighted (5.5/6 diopters). People, Watch for and catch eye problems with your own kids BEFORE they turn four. Early corrective measures (potentially surgery, don't be afraid of it) can have a dramtic effect on proper vision into adulthood.

Distinguish colors in diff. languages

[witte]

Using different languages can make an *enormous* difference in how easy it is for one to distinguish between, for example, blue and green !

Just look at the following Fine Example :

HTML : #0000FF - - - #00FF00
Perl : \0032 - - - \0033
BASIC : Navy - - - Chartreuse


Clearly, hexidecimal notation of HTML is far superior in clarity to all other languages !

Re:Linguistic Determinism?

[SchrodingersRoot]

I did a little reading in some of my old textbooks and online, and what I come away with is that the Sapir-Whorf view is comprised of two things:

Linguistic determinism:
        * strong: language is thought; equal to von Humboldt's world-view/Weltanschauung hypothesis, which predated the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
        * weak: language determines/influences thought; more in line with the Boas/Sapir/Whorf view; this was opposed by what Whorf called the "natural logic" view that language was used to express nonlinguistic thought: "thought does not depend on grammar but on laws of logic or reason which are supposed to be the same for all observers of the universe"

Linguistic relativity:
        * distinctions encoded in one language are unique to that language; "We cut nature up, organise it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language" (Whorf)

None of the (limited) writings of Whorf's that I've read imply that our thoughts are bounded solely by the words we have, let alone those that we choose to speak (as would be the case in the example where if we say something, we believe it).

And the barrel story you point out sounds like something I came across on wikipedia: "Some of Whorf's early work on linguistics and particularly on linguistic relativity was inspired by the reports he wrote on insurance losses, where misunderstanding had been a cause. In one famous example, an employee who was not a native speaker of English had placed drums of liquid near a heater, believing that as a 'flammable' liquid would burn then a 'highly inflammable' one would not."

Now, I haven't read all of the works of Sapir and Whorf, so I could be wrong here, but I think you've been misinformed about the nature of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

A few comments

[Lillesvin]

Attention: After writing this I realize that this may well be the nerdiest post ever, but on the other hand I feel that it'd be a shame to let it go to waste...

Whorf actually said that the structure of ones native language would strongly affect or fully determine the world-view an individual gains when acquiring language. This is what is widely regarded as linguistic determinism in linguistics today.

Whorf also put forward a less extreme claim, namely that difference in the structure of two languages would generally go hand in hand with differences in non-linguistic cognitive processes in the native speakers of the two languages. This is what is generally regarded as linguistic relativity.

It's important to note the emphasis on "structure", since the Whorfian hypothesis would otherwise mean that because the Hopi have one word covering "pilot", "dragonfly" and "aeroplane" they can't distinguish between the three. (Obviously ridiculous.)

Ironically enough, Paul Kay (who co-authored the article in PNAS) was 50% of the infamous universalist duo that wrote Basic Color Terms (1969) --- the other 50% was Brent Berlin --- in which they argued for a universal categorization in the color domain, but lately he's been moving more and more towards a relativist stand-point.

Kay (along with Willett Kempton) was involved in a similar experiment (the one briefly mentioned on the U-Chicago website) in 1984, where they conducted it as a triad experiment. Three color chips were presented to the subject and s/he had to pick the "odd one out". They used Tarahumara (Uto-Aztecan) speakers and English speakers as subjects. Tarahumara does not make the same distinction between "green" and "blue" as English does, but use one word covering the whole spectrum instead. The colors presented to the subject would be close to where the distinction between "blue" and "green" is made in English, but the two colors closest to each other was not always on each side of the "border". (A is called "green", B is called "green" and C is called "blue", but A and C might be closer in terms of wave-length.)
The results came out that the English speaker used a naming strategy when picking the odd one out, whereas the Tarahumara speakers did not, they picked it in terms of wavelength (as expected). That was definitely strong evidence for linguistic relativity. I hope this new experiment is as well-conducted and thought out.

The text on the U-Chicago website states that "Language appears to sharpen visual distinctions in the right visual field, and not in the left visual field", however, I would think that "sharpen" is a bad choice of words and I hope that's not what is meant. Language cannot "sharpen" the distinctions between colors, it can only set up some sort of categorization (as Kay & Kempton described in 1984) and perhaps deceive our brain in various ways. The distinction must still be based primarilly in physiological conditions (color receptors in the eye etc...).

If you're interested in this subject, I suggest you check out the following:
Berlin, B. & Kay, P., 1969. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution.
Davidoff, J., 1997. The Neuropsychology of Color. In Hardin, C. & Maffi, L. (eds.), Color Categories in Thought and Language.
Davidoff, J., 2001. Language and perceptual categories. Trends in Cognitive Science 5:382-87.
Davidoff, J., 2004. Coloured Thinking. Psychologist 17:570-72.
Kay, P. & Kempton, W., 1984. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? American Anthropologist 86:65-79.
Kay, P. & McDaniel, C., 1978. The linguistic signicance of the meanings of basic color terms. Language 54:610-46.
MacLaury, R., 1992. From Brightness to Hue: An Explanatory Model of Color-category Evolution. Current Anthropology 33:137-86.
Newcomer, P. & Faris, J., 1971. Basic Color Terms. International Journal of American Linguistics 37:270-75.

And of course...
Whorf, B., 1971. Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf.

Ok, go ahead, mod me -1bn, karma whore. :-p

Japanese "aoi" and "midori".

[Kaz Kylheku]

It's possible that the reason Japanese has a word that means blue-green is by association with the Chinese word that also means blue-green. The kanji symbol that means blue-green has "aoi" is its "kun" (native Japanese) reading. The "on" (ancient Chinese-derived pronounciations) are sei and sho'. Did "aoi" exist before it was associated with the kanji, or was it invented afterward, giving rise to a Japanese word for a Chinese-derived concept? Which came first, midori or aoi?

The "midori" kanji also has Chinese-derived "roku" and "ryoku" readings which are used in some compounds, so that "light green" can be read as "asamidori" (kun) or "senryoku" (on)!