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 ...
Onde tu anda ? Onde tu estaba ? These are questions that you would hear in everyday Chabacano conversations. I have always found it curious that we (Chabacano speakers) use the word onde instead of donde at times. I thought that maybe our ancestors may have misheard the Spanish Conquistadores, but my recent discovery seems to prove otherwise. It looks like onde is a word that has been present even before Chabacano came into existence. Is it Spanish or Portuguese? One of the things that I love about Chabacano is the many mysteries surrounding it. I have recently found out that onde is actually a Portuguese word for where . However, it is a word that can also be found in the Spanish of certain groups of people such as rural folk in Latin America. In fact, it can be found in the Diccionario de la Academia Real de la Lengua Española which is like the official Spanish dictionary. One Spanish student in the WordReference Language Forums asked about the word onde. She heard her c...