Proto Pahang Malay (PPM) faces significant challenges in the preservation and dissemination of its reconstructed lexical data. Much of the existing data remains locked within physical archives or behind paywalls, limiting accessibility for researchers and leading to fragmented, unsystematic scholarly engagement with the dialect. This study addresses these challenges by reconstructing core lexicons across eleven semantic domains, based on data collected from nine dialectal locations along the Pahang River. Applying the comparative reconstruction framework, the study identifies both native Austronesian lexicons and a limited set of loanwords, particularly from Tai-Kadai, Indo-Eu ropean and other language families. Lexical provenance indicators are proposed to classify these loan elements in a future digital repository, enabling future studies to exclude them from analyses of Austronesian lexical reconstruction. The current phase of the study marks a foundational step toward the creation of a centralised, open-access proto-lexical inventory modelled after resources such as the Austronesian Comparative Dictionary. Beyond academic publication, the study envi sions a digital platform with features such as audio playback, cross-referencing tools, and public access. Collaboration with computational, linguistic, and archival experts is identified as essential for realising this goal. Future research is expected to expand lexical coverage, enhance interactivity, and support language documentation efforts for the wider Malayic linguistic heritage.
The Panji story corpus, a classical Javanese literary work from the Majapahit period (13th-15th centuries), is renowned throughout the archipelago and in several Southeast Asian countries. Panji story serves as the foundation for numerous performing arts productions, paintings, folktales, temple reliefs, and modern literature. This corpus has garnered significant scholarly attention, with the primary conclusion categorising Panji narratives as love stories. This study re-examines the thematic structure of Panji narratives through a corpus-based approach, challenging the long-standing characterisation of the tradition as primarily romance-oriented. Using a corpus of six Panji story texts, this study integrates frequency-based lexical investigation with Key Word in Context (KWIC) analysis using AntConc to identify recurring patterns and dominant thematic elements. Four semantic domains-love, war, death, and wandering-are operationalised through sets of related lexical items, rather than single keywords. The findings indicate that war-related lexicon is the most dominant, followed by death. Love and wandering appear less frequently. More importantly, these domains exhibit different levels of semantic coherence and narrative function. War has high contextual stability and strong thematic centrality, while death operates with a dual semantic structure combining literal and figurative meanings. On the other hand, love shows significant semantic dispersion, indicating that its frequency does not directly correspond to thematic dominance. Wandering demonstrates functional coherence as a mechanism of narrative development. These results suggest that understanding the story's central theme requires examining the interaction between frequency, contextual use, and semantic coherence. By bridging traditional philology and modern computational methods, this study highlights the potential of digital humanities in redefining our approach to literary studies.
Films featuring ethnic and religious themes elicit strong reactions and criticism. Minangkabau con tent films are no exception. Social life is not always reflected in the themes of religious and ethnic films. The film, however, may also communicate specific messages. The present study examines two Minangkabau films, namely Para Perintis Kemerdekaan (Pioneers of Independence) (1977) and Di Bawah Lindungan Ka’bah (Under the Protection of the Kaaba) (2013). It is argued that both include Minangkabau representations of Islam and traditional customs. To arrive at symbols, meanings, and discourse structures, the two films draw on social semiotics and film semiotics within a criti cal discourse framework. The internal strife between Islamic and traditional groups in the Minan gkabau, therefore, features in both films. According to Minangkabau history, this discourse emerged during the Padri War and the colonial period. A collective idea that prevails in Minangkabau social life to this day is conflict discourse. Thus, using mainly visual imagery, filmmakers process and crea te this collective conception in the dramatisation of film stories.
With the exception of a few scholarly articles published outside Iran concentrating on its historical, political, and sociological dimensions, the fiction of the Iranian-Armenian female writer Zoya Pirzad has generally situated within the formalistic theories by the academic community inside Iran. Some scholars have attributed the broad readership appeal of Pirzad’s fiction to her rendering of the everyday concerns of Iranian women living in a patriarchal society. Others have emphasised Pirzad’s portrayal of Armenian people and their lifestyle as the reason behind the wide acclaim given to her works in the 2000s by a public of Muslim readers. The present article, however, rather than interpreting her works, aims to discuss the energies and flows within selected works of the writer through the lens of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. We discuss among others terms such as becoming-woman/ child, nomadism, rhizome, de- and re-territorialisation, in-betweenness, to argue that Pirzad’s fiction is a locale for transformations and becomings materialised through women and chil dren. However, Pirzad also provides instances of reterritorialisation in order to make women aware of the regimes of signs which entangle them in the name of freedom. In this perspective, rather than merely targeting the nation’s male-oriented ambiance, Pirzad’s fiction proposes becoming as a possibility to improve the situation of women and children in postrevolutionary Iranian society.
This article examines how the transatlantic relations of the African continent developed during the Iberian Union (1580-1640). Its aim is to consider Africa’s place in oceanic dynamics during the period of Portugal’s incorporation into the Hispanic Monarchy and the consolidation of the Atlantic world by analysing the islands of Macaronesia as a link between Africa and European and American territories. Historical research enables an understanding of the African diaspora in the Iberian Atlantic and the cross-border relations that connected Atlantic Africa with other territories linked to the Oce an through cross-border networks. Primary documentation is an indispensable tool to carry out a comprehensive social, economic and cultural study; to produce an analysis both from the royal perspective as well as at the local level and to confront the interpretation that the metropolis and the islands construct about the object of this study: the African diaspora.
