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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 Disaster Related Words in Chabacano

Zamboanga city is not a stranger to disasters. We have seen our share of man-made and natural disasters in the past. So in this blog post, I'm going to discuss disaster-related vocabulary found in the Chabacano de Zamboanga.

Recently, we have been getting a lot of avenida in Zamboanga city. Can you guess what the word avenida means? It means flood. In Spanish, aside from 'avenue', avenida can mean the overflow of a river and this is most probably how this Chabacano word came about.

Unlike most of the Philippines, Zamboanga city is never in the path of a typhoon or as they say in Chabacano TV Patrol, tifun. This word though is not found in the Chabacano de Zamboanga dictionary by Camins which leads me to think that it is a word borrowed by TV Patrol Chabacano from the Spanish language. Normally, we use the word baguio (from Tagalog) although it is said with the stress on the letter 'a' (like when you say Baguio, the place).

Another disaster that rarely happens in Zamboanga city are earthquakes. In the Chabacano de Zamboanga, the word for 'earthquake' is temblor.

Lastly, we have fires, which we call quema (not to be confused with the verb quema). As a noun, the stress on this word falls on the letter 'e'. We also have the word incendio in Chabacano which are large fires.

Here now are some example sentences using the words introduced above:

Chabacano: Bien tarda ya puede apaga el mga bombero con el quema na Canelar anoche.
English: It took a long time for the firemen to extinguish the fire at Canelar last night.

Chabacano: Bien fuerte gale aquel temblor na Japan no? Bien mucho gayod gente ya mori.
English: That earthquake in Japan was so strong right? A lot of people died.

Chabacano: Bueno ya lang, ya para ya el ulan, kay baka hay tene ya tambien avenida.
English: It's a good thing that the rain had stopped already because we might have experienced flooding again.

Comments

  1. Tifún: strong wind with heavy rain
    Aguacero: rain
    Temblor: earthquake
    Remolino: tornado
    Avenida: strong water current
    Marejada: wave
    Grande Marejada: Storm Surge

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