Zompist Bboard Again

Red always* means danger or arousal, but does green always mean ready-to-go or done? Do bad experiences leave a sour taste in all cultures? Is anxiety ever associated with some spatial concept other than narrowness?

Is it even possible to list all such associations? Let's get to the bottom of it! (...or maybe to the top of it in that one language)

^{*for the purposes of this thread, let always equal more than say 90%}

I don't think you're going to get a useful answer here— we don't have many hunter-gatherer or other indigenous people, and not even enough non-Westerners.

I'm dubious even that the "kiki/bouba" effect is universal. (Wikipedia suggests that it fails for Turkish and Mandarin.). More anecdotally, is "ko" a soft feminine suffix? It is in Japanese. Is "Mohtab" a nice feminine name? It is in Farsi.

Red is a propitious color in China; "red" is literally "beautiful" in Russian.

I expect agoraphobes would have very different opinions about wideness and anxiety...

Yeah, admittedly it'd be a massive undertaking to make a comprehensive study of these sorts of semantics. But I was hoping somebody would know at least one association that is shared between more than a few cultures / language families - for linguistic and conlang inspiration.

Zju wrote: ↑Tue Aug 20, 2024 2:32 pm Do bad experiences leave a sour taste in all cultures?

They leave a "bitterer Nachgeschmack" in German, i.e. "a bitter after-taste".

There used to be people in Germany who saw red as "the color of love", but I don't know if anyone still thinks that way. Little hearts symbolizing love seem to be usually red in US pop culture, too, though.

Creyeditor wrote: ↑Wed Aug 21, 2024 1:57 pm

Zju wrote: ↑Tue Aug 20, 2024 2:32 pm Do bad experiences leave a sour taste in all cultures?

They leave a "bitterer Nachgeschmack" in German, i.e. "a bitter after-taste".

That sounds cromulent to me, and I'm a native English-speaker.

Raphael wrote: ↑Wed Aug 21, 2024 3:28 pm There used to be people in Germany who saw red as "the color of love", but I don't know if anyone still thinks that way. Little hearts symbolizing love seem to be usually red in US pop culture, too, though.

Possibly more the colour of sexual desire, and I suspect that's a universal. Or are literal red-light districts just a Eurasian thing?