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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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Origins of the Chabacano Bisia

I was looking for the Portuguese translation of the verb 'to watch' because I was trying to impress a Brazilian friend with my non-existent Portuguese skills when I came across the Portuguese word vigiar. I listened to how this word is pronounced and it struck me that it is pronounced so much like the Chabacano word bisia. The reason all this interested me a lot was because I have been for some time trying to figure out the origins of the Chabacano word bisia and I think that the Portuguese vigiar is a very good candidate. According to this dictionary, the Portuguese vigiar means to watch, keep an eye on, to spy on, to keep watch over, to guard, to be on the lookout.

Below are sentences in Chabacano using the word bisia and you will notice that the Chabacano bisia and the Portuguese vigiar are almost the same.

Chabacano: Bisia con el casa.
English: Watch over the house.

Chabacano: Puede tu bisia con el perro mio un rato?
English: Can you keep an eye on my dog for a while?

Chabacano: Quien ta bisia con el tienda?
English: Who is watching over (manning) the store?

Chabacano: Puede tu bisia con el coche mio?
English: Can you keep watch over my car?

Bisia is also found in the 1901 Chabacano transcript which I featured in this post. They spelled this word as bisia so this was the spelling that I followed in this article. The Chabacano bisia is most often spelled and pronounced as bisha.

Bisia can also mean to make critical comments about someone. An example is telling someone that a common female acquaintance looks fat in her dress.

This word is absent in Camins' Chabacano dictionary. I only found it in Santos' dictionary and it is listed as vicia and bisia. Take your pick. 😆

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Comments

  1. coronadoFebruary 3, 2015 at 8:28 AM

    I guess (it's just my own assumption) that the Chabacano language adopted this way to write the word "vigiar" because the sound of g letter in the Portuguese language sounds like a "j" letter, which also consequently resembles a soft s or sh. It's not uncommon to see people writing these words with a "j" letter instead of "g" letter. There have some Portuguese creoles or languages who suffered influence from the language that have this way to write that I mentioned above, like for example the word "jerasaun" in Tetum language, language spoken in Timor-Leste and which is a kind of cousin of Tagalog and of the other Filipino languages.

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  2. 優次 (Yuji)April 20, 2017 at 2:26 PM

    Just like coronado, I'm a native Portuguese speaker and I second what you guys are saying about "vigiar".

    Another hypothesis would be that it comes from Galician. In Modern Galician, there's "vixiar", which is pronounced almost exactly as in Zamboangueño.

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