{"id":33373,"date":"2005-11-10T09:57:52","date_gmt":"2005-11-10T09:57:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2005\/11\/10\/the-etymology-of-the-word-traffic-light\/"},"modified":"2005-11-10T09:57:52","modified_gmt":"2005-11-10T09:57:52","slug":"the-etymology-of-the-word-traffic-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20051110-52\/?p=33373","title":{"rendered":"The etymology of the word “traffic light”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some languages are very creative with their term for those red\/green thingies that control (or at least try to control) the flow of vehicular traffic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Language<\/th>\nterm<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
US English<\/td>\ntraffic light<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
South African English<\/td>\nrobot<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Swedish<\/td>\ntrafikljus (lit: traffic light)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
German<\/td>\nAmpel<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Mandarin Chinese<\/td>\n紅綠燈 hóng lyù dēng (lit: red green light)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

Swedish proves the least surprising in this respect (from a US English point of view), using the same term as US English. South African English is the funniest with their “robot”. (It makes sense in its own way: It’s a device that replaces a policeman directing traffic.) In my experience, South African English is full of cute little words like this. I imagine that Germans find Swiss German similarly quaint. <\/p>\n

The German word “Ampel” has the most interesting history of the set. It originally entered the German language as “ampulla”, an urn filled with paraffin and used as a lamp<\/a> (cognate to English “amphora”). You can easily imagine how this word gradually evolved into the term for a traffic signal. <\/p>\n

The Mandarin Chinese term for traffic light is to me quite enlightening as well. The Taiwanese term for traffic light is “hòng lí dūn”, and I assumed it was just a made-up word unconnected with any other words. (In the same way that the English word “elephant” just is; it’s not built out of other English words like “ele” and “phant”.) Since the Taiwanese words for “red”, “green” and “light” are nothing like the Mandarin Chinese words, I was unable to make the connection. Now I see its etymology and it makes sense. <\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I haven’t been making the progress that I’d have liked on Mandarin. Even though my meager knowledge of Taiwanese should’ve given me a head start (since about 80% of Taiwanese words are to varying degrees cognate with Mandarin Chinese), it doesn’t help with the grammar at all because I don’t understand Taiwanese grammar consciously. The words just make sense and I don’t know why. <\/p>\n

Which is too bad because the grammatical structure of Mandarin Chinese is radically different from that of Germanic languages, with which I have had a long-time fascination<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some languages are very creative with their term for those red\/green thingies that control (or at least try to control) the flow of vehicular traffic. Language term US English traffic light South African English robot Swedish trafikljus (lit: traffic light) German Ampel Mandarin Chinese 紅綠燈 hóng lyù dēng (lit: red green light) Swedish proves the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-33373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Some languages are very creative with their term for those red\/green thingies that control (or at least try to control) the flow of vehicular traffic. Language term US English traffic light South African English robot Swedish trafikljus (lit: traffic light) German Ampel Mandarin Chinese 紅綠燈 hóng lyù dēng (lit: red green light) Swedish proves the […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}