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The Little Prince By Antoine De Saint-Exupéry Is Now Available In Chabacano!

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While Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) written by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry in 1943 now has over 300 translations in different languages worldwide and is now considered the world’s most translated book (not counting religious works), there have been surprisingly only two translations of his book in the Philippines (Filipino and Bicol). El Diutay Principe is only the third edition featuring a Philippine language. The Little Prince is a classic French novella about a pilot who gets stranded in the desert after a plane crash and encounters a little fellow who asks him to draw a sheep for him. Through the course of their meeting, the pilot rediscovers the true meaning of life and what people should value the most. When I came across the book in 2013, I found that I could relate very well to the negative image given to “growing up” in the book. When the idea to translate the book into my mother tongue was presented to me, I didn’t think twice. I thought, ‘a lot of people my
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Origins of the Chabacano Pacha

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The word for 'kick' in Chabacano is pacha. This word comes from the Spanish patear. Patear though is a colloquial term for 'kick', it is not formal Spanish. Here are some examples of how we use the Chabacano pacha.

Chabacano: No pacha conmigo!
English: Don't kick me!

Chabacano: Ya manda le conmigo pacha contigo.
English: He asked me to kick you or he made me kick you.

Chabacano: No pacha con el perro!
English: Don't kick the dog!

Pacha is just one of the words that have its origins in colloquial or informal Spanish. it is probably one of the reasons why Chabacano got its name. Chabacano in Spanish means 'vulgar' or 'something of bad taste'.

If you're wondering how patea became pacha, it is because of palatalization. This affects the pronunciation of words which results to words like tiene being pronounced as chene in Chabacano.

I posted this article on the Zamboanga de Antes Facebook Group and these are the comments it received.


The word pacha is not found in Camins' dictionary. Santos' dictionary has it and he spells it as patea.


This article was also published in the International Year of Indigenous Languages Philippines website.

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Comments

  1. PrinsJuly 12, 2012 at 10:42 AM

    Are chavacano speakers emphasizing the rolling of their tongue when pronouncing the double r?

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  2. Jerome HerreraJuly 13, 2012 at 6:16 AM

    I don't believe so. It depends mostly on the person. Some would but most wouldn't. When it comes to words like pero and perro, the meaning would be determined by the context and the pronounciation the word. The word perro is pronounced as pehro or with a prolonged e. That is my observation. Generally though, we pronounce words like barre, derrama, and etc as you would pronounce the r in Tagalog words like paaralan. Most people though would pronounce these words as bahre and dehrama (glottal stop)

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