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 ...
In this post from a Facebook group, somebody asked what the difference is between the words tio, tia, pai , and mai . The conclusion in this discussion was that all these words mean the same thing but that pai and mai are used by Chabacano speakers who live in the countryside or rural areas. The same words (with the same pronunciation) exist in Portuguese and they mean father ( pai ) and mother ( mae ). In this article about Puerto Rican Spanish , it is said that: "Puerto Ricans also often shorten words by eliminating whole syllables. A good example are the words para , madre , and padre ("for", "mother", and "father"): Puerto Ricans may pronounce para as /pa/, madre as /mai/, and padre as /pai/." If you ask me, I think the original meaning of these words are mother and father (originating from Spanish or Portuguese) but somehow the meaning just got obscured. How it got obscured though is bey...