Research Project
Researchers: I Proudfoot (Owned by)
Full description The Malay Concordance Project (MCP) utilizes computer technology to create a rich concordance of classical Malay literature, with the aim of helping scholars share resources for the study of this literature. The centrepiece of this project is a growing corpus of classical Malay texts, comprising (as of the year 2012) 165 texts and 5.8 million words, including 140,000 verses. These texts can be searched on-line to provide useful information about: *contexts in which words are used. *where particular terms or names occur in texts. *patterns of morphology and syntax. In the space of a single year the MCP collection was consulted by scholars from more than 30 countries world-wide, who made over 20,000 searches. The MCP allows users to search material from classical and pre-modern Malay to vernacular newspaper texts. Until the early twentieth century, a scholarly edition of a classical Malay text might use the Jawi script, which was adapted from Arabic. But during the twentieth century, in Indonesia and Malaysia, Arabic script has been largely displaced by Roman spelling. Modern editions of classical Malay texts are now published in Roman script, both to make the text accessible to modern readers, and because the Roman spellings are complete phonemically. The MCP therefore includes texts based on Roman transcriptions of manuscript material. The texts are listed both alphabetically and chronologically. Researchers may search individual texts, categories of texts or the entire collection for words and phrases. The MCP website also includes a range of essays and links relevant to the study of classical Malay. The project may be useful to those interested in Malay studies (including literature, history and culture) and linguisitics.
