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

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

How to say Many in Chabacano

I was checking my Facebook when I stumbled upon an on-going discussion in a Facebook group page about when to use the words monton, mucho, and manada in Chabacano. If you haven't realized it yet, these three words all mean the same thing (many).


The first word in the list is monton. This comes from the Spanish noun montón and it is pronounced in Chabacano the same way as it is pronounced in Spanish. the Tagalog gabundok probably comes from this Spanish word. Montón literally means a big mountain and whenever we say that there is a montón of something, we are actually comparing something to a big mountain. If you watch Philippine television, you have probably heard the expression gabundok na labada in a laundry detergent commercial, this expression literally means a mountain of laundry. Here are some sentences using the Spanish montón (from http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/mont%C3%B3n):

Spanish: Sabe un montón de astronomía.
English: He knows loads about astronomy.

Spanish: Me gusta un montón.
English: I'm mad about him.

Spanish: Me duele un montón.
English: It hurts like mad.

Here are some sentences using the Chabacano monton. I got this from the Facebook discussion I was talking about earlier.

Chabacano: Monton gayod el gente que ya atende y participa na procesion sobre el celebracion del Fiesta Pilar
English: There were a lot of people who attended and participated in the procession related to the Fiesta Pilar celebration

Chabacano: Monton de gente arrestado
English: A lot of people arrested

Chabacano: Monton de comida
English: A lot of food

One glaring difference in the usage of monton in Chabacano from its Spanish counterpart is that Chabacano does not put the word un in front of monton. Also, it looks like some people use this word as a noun and some as an adjective. The first sentence used this word as an adjective and the others used it as a noun.

Mucho and manada are pretty much the words used by the general population for 'many'. Monton is actually not used very much especially by the younger population or those that are not very fluent with Chabacano.

Camins, in his Chabacano dictionary, says that the word manada is a noun and is supposed to mean a herd of animals. He points out that the way it is being used today as an adjective to mean 'many' is incorrect. If you will ask Chabacano speakers, however, a majority will probably tell you that manada means many and that manada and mucho are synonyms. The definition of the Spanish manada is a herd of animals or a large group of people. It is highly likely that the definition of the Chabacano manada used to be the same as its Spanish counterpart and later on evolved to its present day Chabacano definition.

Here are sentences using the words manada and mucho in Chabacano.

Chabacano: Mucho subay encima del mesa
English: (There are) a lot of ants on top of the table

Chabacano: Manada fruta el pono de manga.
English: The mango tree has a lot of fruit.

Just like in Spanish, the word montonada which is another variety of monton also occurs in Chabacano.

Comments

  1. Montón (montão, in Portuguese) is also used quite often in Portuguese.

    It's quite interesting to observe how the word manada it's used in the Chabacano. That's another one that I learn from the language. It's also a good example of false cognate, specially for us who speak languages from the Latin family of languages.

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