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Originally Posted by AnonYMouse
In Neo lingo, they always describe Koyo as red or pink. I don't think I've every seen "purple" or "murasaki" used.
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The term Aka or Beni when used for the terms "akabana" or "benibana" means any of the red to pink to purple colors that may appear in Neofinetia flowers, including colors that would normally otherwise be referred to as "murasaki". Unless the color is perceptually more on the blue end of the spectrum. In traditional Japanese, there's less of a linguistic barrier between the individual color terms between Aka, Beni, and Murasaki, unlike in English where the colors are more strictly differentiated.
That said, if a plant is advertised as having "murasaki" colored flowers, growers in Japan would assume that the plant has flowers the color of a Darwinara Charm 'Blue Moon', not the color of your Koyo...
Quote:
Originally Posted by AnonYMouse
Might be a language thing. I rarely see things described as "midori" (green) but often see "ao" (blue) instead. Example in Neos is "aojiku".
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The word 青, originally refers to any color ranging from green through blue.
While lately, Ao is more associated with blue than green, it's still very much entrenched in the language in places where it would better mean green than blue. "Ao-yasai" means green vegetables, "Ao-shingo" means green traffic light.
You'll also hear the word Ryoku for green, such as Ryoku-bana for green flowers and in names such as Ryokuhou. Ryoku is a color that's strictly green and never blue.
Midori as a word that usually stands by itself and usually needs a modifier to be used as an adjective. To say "green stem" you'd say "Midoriiro no jiku" if you insist on using the term Midori. With Ao though, it's a word that is more often used as a compound word, so you can just tack it onto the word for stem and get "Aojiku".
On the other hand, Aobana would always mean "blue flower" and never "green flower" So a Hisui's flowers would described as Ryoku or Midori, and not Ao.
Overall, in the Japanese language, historically, the colors were named rather simply with large ranges of colors were collected under generalized umbrella terms. Only when individual specific shades and colors needed to be pointed out, they were then described using more specific terms. And then... in many other cases it just comes down to them being idiomatic expressions.