Sketching the Semantic Change of Jahanam and Hijrah: a Corpus Based Approach to Manuscripts of Arabic-Indonesian Lexicon
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Available online: http://journal.imla.or.id/index.php/arabi Arabi : Journal of Arabic Studies, 5 (1), 2020, 1-10 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24865/ajas.v5i1.246 SKETCHING THE SEMANTIC CHANGE OF JAHANAM AND HIJRAH: A CORPUS BASED APPROACH TO MANUSCRIPTS OF ARABIC-INDONESIAN LEXICON Dewi Puspita1, Kamal Yusuf2 1Universitas Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia 2Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Ampel Surabaya, Indonesia E-mail : [email protected] Abstract There are a significant number of lexical borrowings from Arabic language to Indonesian language. Among of them are the words jahanam and hijrah. These words are diachronically can be traced and found in literatures and religious texts. This paper seeks to scrutinize the semantic change of jahanam and hijrah. This paper analyses jahanam and hijrah as they are used in both old manuscripts and modern texts. To see their semantic change behaviour, collocation and concordance of their contexts were analysed. The manuscripts employed as the source of research data were taken from the Malay Concordance Project (MCP) which comprises of 165 classical Malay literatures containing some Islamic texts, Corpora Collection Leipzig University, and WebCorp Live Birmingham City University. Using the corpus linguistics method, this research manages to demonstrate how words change semantically through time. The results of this study can be used as material for the preparation of the Indonesian- Arabic etymology dictionary. Keywords: manuscript, diachronic, corpus linguistics, semantic change Abstrak Cukup banyak leksikon bahasa Arab yang diserap oleh bahasa Indonesia, antara lain, seperti kata jahanam dan hijrah. Secara diakronis, kata tersebut dapat ditelusuri di dalam teks kesusasteraan dan keagamaan. Makalah ini berusaha menelusuri perubahan makna pada kata jahanam dan hijrah. Tulisan ini bertujuan menganalisis kata jahanam dan hijrah yang digunakan dan terdapat pada manuskrip-manuskrip kuno serta teks- teks modern dengan melihat perilaku semantisnya, kolokasi, serta konkordansinya dalam konteks. Untuk itu, sumber data yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini berasal dari Malay Concordance Project (MCP), terdiri atas 165 karya sastra Melayu klasik dan teks-teks keislaman. Selain itu, data juga bersumber dari Corpora Collection Leipzig University, dan WebCorp Live Birmingham City University. Dengan menggunakan metode linguistik korpus, temuan penelitian ini menunjukkan bagaimana kata-kata mengalami perubahan semantik secara diakronis. Hasil penelitian ini dapat digunakan sebagai materi untuk penyiapan kamus etimologi bahasa Indonesia-Arab. Kata Kunci: manuskrip, diakronis, linguistik korpus, perubahan makna Copyright © 2020, p-ISSN 2548-6616 e-ISSN 2548-6624 Arabi : Journal of Arabic Studies Introduction The contents of manuscripts scattered across the Indonesian certainly bring a lot of foreign vocabulary to the archipelago. Many foreign vocabularies are then absorbed into Malay (Liaw Yock Fang, 1991; Riddell, 2012). There are complete forms of absorption (the exact spelling and pronunciation) and some are adjusted both spelling and pronunciation. The arrival of Islam to the archipelago has brought a great influence not only in religion and culture, but also in language (Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa, 1996; Berg, 2007; Jones et. al., 2007; van Dam, 2010). This can be seen from the many Arabic words that enrich Malay and Indonesian vocabulary through absorption and borrowing (Julul, et.al., 2019). In 1996, the book of Senarai Kata Serapan dalam Bahasa Indonesia (List of loan words in Indonesian) recorded 1,495 loanwords from Arabic. That number might have been increased by now. Many of the Arabic loanwords’ meanings have now been deviated far from the original meaning. The change in meaning is natural because languages, including its vocabulary, always develop and change. Contact with outside culture causes some vocabularies to change some of its sound, form, and or meaning from its original especially when language users have no prior knowledge on the etymology or the history of the word. People currently study one manuscript at one time carefully to get the core and lessons from it due to an uncertain amount of time needed to study many manuscripts. An effective and efficient method for studying large numbers of manuscripts is the corpus linguistic method. Corpus linguistics can simplify and make the work for months or even years into just a couple of minutes. Corpus linguistics is a research method that utilizes corpus data that is a collection of pieces of language text in electronic form, selected according to external criteria to represent, as far as possible, a language or language variety as a source of data for linguistic research (Sinclair, 2004). O'Donnell (2008) further explains that corpus data contains authentic language data designed and collected according to sampling procedures in an electronic or machine-readable form. The data is a representative of language and used for linguistic investigation. In corpus linguistics, what is meant by digitalization is not just the transfer of media from print to digital media, but it is more about digitalization that makes the manuscripts readable by the corpus tools. To be used in the corpus, manuscripts must be converted into a plain file. Researchers interested in studying manuscripts through corpus are now facilitated by the existence of the Malay Concordance Project (MCP). MCP is a corpus of classical Malay texts developed by Ian Proudfoot (1991), comprising 165 texts and 5.8 million words, including 140,000 verses, dating from the 14th to the 20th century. Those texts are collected from some reputable philologists (Gallop, 2013). The corpus provides useful information about contexts in which words are used, where particular terms or names occur in texts, and patterns of morphology and syntax. There have been many studies conducted using MCP, including linguistics research. Among them are studies by Siaw-Fong Chung (2011) on a corpus based study on the uses of the affix ‚ter‛ in Malay, Wade and Li’s (2012) study of Anthony Reid and the study of the Southeast Asian Past, and also Maziar (2012) who study about Malay kingship in Kedah, its religion, trade, and society. MCP has made it much easier to research about Malay and Indonesian. There are some more corpora on Malay and Indonesian language, but the texts they contained is not of manuscripts. The oldest texts would be from the 20th century and some of them originated in digital form. For some research, that does not cover all the need. Another way to do this is by comparing two or more different corpora from different era. Corpus like MCP can be set diachronically so that user can see from the concordance or word collocates whether a word has similar or different meaning from time to time. We can also compare corpus of old data with another corpus from a more current data. From the time shown in the corpus we can also see when the changes occurred. One example of the utilization of digitized Islamic text for linguistics research has been carried out by Nor Hashimah et al (2012) in his research on the change of meaning of the word Vol. 5 No. 1 | 2-10 Copyright © 2020 | ARABI | p-ISSN 2548-6616 | e-ISSN 2548-6624 Arabi : Journal of Arabic Studies alim in Malaysian. Although the focus of the research is on cognitive semantic analysis, the words analysed and the data sources used are examples of how digital Islamic texts are utilized in transdisciplinary linguistic research. Nor Hashimah et al analysed how the meaning of Arabic- origin word alim has change through time by looking at the concordance of alim in UKM-DBP (Malaysian Language and Library Council) corpus. UKM-DBP corpus is a 5 million words data taken from UKM-DBP data bank which comprises of newspaper, magazines and books. Unfortunately, as mentioned previously, the corpus contains many Islamic texts but none of them are of old manuscripts. From the corpus, she found that there are four new meaning of the word alim in addition to its original meaning. From that finding they continue the analysis to cognitive semantic. To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous research that has investigated the semantic change of Indonesian lexicon from Arabic origin utilising corpus method. Using corpora in analysing the semantic change can be advantageous in threefold: (1) it enables us to track different language used of a word across the time, (2) it gives us an authentic evidence of changes in a language through time, and (3) it helps us to identify new meanings of a word. Therefore, this paper was aimed to investigate the Indonesian lexicon of Arabic origin. In more specific, the words jahanam and hijrah will be tracked. These two words are considered frequently used recently in media. As a result, this study aims at describing how these words have changed semantically from their origin word in Arabic as well as at tracing them diachronically from time to time. Additionally, this research offers to demonstrate how to use of Islamic manuscripts for study in the field of applied linguistics by exploiting the available online corpora. Method To analyse the semantic change of the current researched words, we used corpus- based approach. There were three corpora used in this research, namely MCP, Indonesian corpus from Corpora Collection Leipzig University (Leipzig Corpora), and WebCorp Live. To mention some of Islamic manuscripts stored in MCP used as the source of data in this study. Table 1 presents their list. Table 1. Islamic