Perception And Metaphorical Smell: A Malay Manuscript Study (Petua Membina Rumah) as an Asian Text

Scholars of architecture have at times recorded sense of smell metaphors in the site selection processes of Malay houses. This has been described in several manuscripts within discourses of Tips of Building a Home (Petua Membina Rumah). This paper analyses smell metaphors using the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). The theoretical framework is based on a corpus, which generates three sets of manuscript data, namely MSS741, MSS1521 and Tajul Muluk, to access the Keyword In Context (KWIC) of bau (smell) and baunya (its smell). This paper uses a qualitative study design around a Malay manuscript. Three main findings emerged from this paper. First, the existence of the metaphor of ‘smell’ contained in the Malay manuscripts was evident. Secondly, the conceptual metaphor was formed according to domain structures such as smell, sound, touch, taste, vision and spirituality. Third, the metaphor of ‘smell’ aligns with feeling, which suggests that humans can use the tongue to sense odours. This study thus becomes significant in explaining the ways in which the concept of smell is linguistically coded in the Malay language and attempts to present elements of Malay wisdom based on the ‘smell’ metaphors.