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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 ...
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How to say to feed and to bathe in Chabacano

In this blog post, I will be teaching two expressions using the word dale that you probably will not find in any Chabacano dictionary. These are dale come and dale baña. These mean to feed someone and to bathe someone respectively. Note that these are normally used when referring to feeding/ bathing babies, and pets. Literally, dale come means give eat and dale baña give bathe.

Here are some sentences using these two expressions:

Chabacano: Que hora tu dale come con el perro?
English: What time will you be feeding the dog?

Chabacano: No hay pa yo dale come con el mga manok.
English: I haven’t fed the chickens yet.

Chabacano: Quien contigo ya dale baña?
English: Who bathed you?

Chabacano: Sabe ba tu que modo dale baña bata?
English: Do you know how to bathe a child?

So there you go. Two expressions using the Chabacano word dale which you’ll never learn from grammar books and dictionaries.

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