English ‘Green’ and its Arabic Equivalent ‘Akhḏar’: Similar or Different?

Abstract

This lexical contrastive study aims at investigating the similarities and differences between the English color term "green" and its Arabic equivalent "akhḏar" in terms of: denotative meanings, connotative meanings, morphological specifications, inflections, derivations, compounding, metaphorical meanings and idiomatic uses. Data were collected from several monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, and electronic databases. The analysis revealed that the color terms "green" and "akhḏar" express similar meanings in addition to their common universal meaning as terms expressing a color between yellow and blue. However, despite the similarity, each lexical item expresses different meanings not expressed by its equivalent..