r/NonPoliticalTwitter 12h ago

Funny Learning Japanese

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u/Lloyd_lyle 12h ago

Colors are gonna be that way since they're a social construct that varies between cultures. Pink is just viewed as "light red" in a lot of languages so yeah you're gonna get a loanword.

u/magein07 6h ago

Except in japanese, the colors are actually mostly different from english. Blue = ao Green = midori Red = aka Yellow = kiiro

There are obviously a lot that still sound like Engrish, but the main colors have their own words.

u/DiE95OO 4h ago

Ao can also mean green, fun fact.

u/magein07 4h ago

Yeah, historically (before the heian period (794-1185)) they used ao to describe all the nature colors and cool colors which included blue and green and only later decided that there should be more distinction between them.

Though even to this day ao is still used in the words for green apples, the green light in stop lights and several other things.