Chaki dabartinėje lietuvių (rašto) kalboje
Khaki in modern (written) Lithuanian

Summary/Abstract: The article addresses the issue of whether the lexeme khaki is unambiguous in written Lithuanian, and of how deeply it is rooted in the language. The names of the colour are dissected from a syntactic-semantic standpoint, in reliance on material from the Corpus of the Modern Lithuanian Language (CMLL) by the Centre of Computational Linguistics at Vytautas Magnus University. Analysis of the CMLL cases and their comparison with potential synonyms has revealed that this adjective can have the meanings of ‘(light) (greyish) brownish green (colour)’, ‘(light) greyish and/or greenish and/or yellowish brown (colour)’, and ‘(light) brownish or greenish yellow (colour)’. In general and with reference to the prototype green resp. brown, we can talk about transitional khaki shades of grass and earth. Based on the analogy of the colour of sand, the khaki of earth with its broader sense is distinguished from the khaki of grass, which usually correlates with the colour of the military uniform. The colour khaki is verbally expressed using its simple and/or complex lexeme. In modern Lithuanian, the names of this colour can be used both in variation and in opposition. This has to do with the type of the construction (attributive vs. predicative) and/or semantic combinability (natural objects vs. man-made artefacts). Semantically, khaki can be vague. The complex lexeme of the colour is rather more definite and transparent. The study has showed that the loanword khaki is taking its first steps towards solidifying its place in the Lithuanian language.

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