When I was in college, my friends and I made up a random cultural joke aimed at our Portuguese friends. It was that Portuguese people couldn't tell the difference between green and blue. There's obviously no truth in this, but the sheer ridiculousness of the joke made it endure, and I still like to refer to green things jokingly as "portuguese blue".
Well, it turns out that Vietnamese people actually can't tell the difference between green and blue. The word "xanh" refers to both green and blue. You have to add a modifier to the word, such as "like the sky" or "like a leaf" in order to make the distinction. Why didn't they just make up another word? Who knows? Why is the sky green?
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