Cool Kanji – 橙
This kanji is pronounced だいだい, and I bet you can figure out the meaning pretty easily if I give it to you in this set: 赤, 橙, 黄, 緑, 青, 藍, 紫.
Get it yet? No? Give those another quick look.
Yup, it’s the kanji for orange. You see it infrequently, almost always written. So yeah, supposedly it’s pronounced だいだい色(いろ), but I wonder if people just read it オレンジ. Can any native speakers confirm? 橙 is generally used as the color in the rainbow, but Wikipedia also tells me it came from the Chinese fruit the daidai…which looks like a mikan, except the English name is bitter orange? I’m keen to try one.
The other cool kanji in there that you might not know is 藍(あい), which is indigo. Wikipedia Japan says that Americans generally think the rainbow only has six colors, but I can personally confirm that is bogus. Clearly Wikipedia Japan hasn’t met Mr. Roy G. Biv – that’s the acronym I learned in elementary school to keep the colors straight.
Japan dis’ing American color sense? I’d be more impressed if they could figure out the difference between green and blue (e.g. regarding traffic signals).
I’ve never heard of 橙 before. Pretty cool. I’ll quiz a few friends about that one later.
Comment by Andy Fossett — March 30, 2009 @ 8:34 am
Wow. I’ve run into anecdotal misconceptions of the perception of rainbows before, plus the belief that there’s lack of the color indigo in the English language.
Yet to see it written on Wikipedia happens to annoy me quite a bit.
Luckily, the good thing about Wikipedia is that you can edit stuff other people wrote…
Comment by Adam — March 30, 2009 @ 9:32 am
Good point about blue and green. Apparently old Japanese people still call the lights green. I had a really stubborn JTE when I taught English, and he forced the junior high kids to memorize this stupid sentence: “When the light is red I must stop. When the light is blue I can go…” Something like that.
Wonder where they got the info for the 6-color rainbow in English.
Comment by Daniel — March 31, 2009 @ 9:15 am
I googled 1Q84 and came here. I won’t check your blog back for a while to avoid any spoiler. By the way, 橙 is still read as ‘だいだい’ by Japanese natives including me. There might be a situation somebody put オレンジ as ruby but it will seem really odd.
Comment by MS — May 29, 2009 @ 12:58 am