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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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The Chabacano Acudi and Apacigua

My mom once told me "ya acudi daw con de tuyo tita". I swear it was the first time I have heard of that word so I checked what it meant online and apparently, this word means several things to different people. The Chabacano word acudi could mean the following:

A. To have a sudden rise in blood pressure
B. To have a stroke or a heart attack
C. To faint
D. To rush someone to the hospital

It isn't hard to imagine how this myriad of definitions of the word acudi developed in Chabacano (since they are all related to one another).

In Spanish, one of the definitions of acudir is 'to aid someone'. In Camins' Chabacano dictonary, he defines acudi as 'to assist' or 'to succor' while in Santos', he defines it as 'to help' or 'to aid'.

Here is a post in Chabacano which I found in Facebook using the word acudi.

"Este clase de potaje, hinay-hinay aquellos tiene alta presion..... no vaya acudi ya lang con vosotros hora de comida. Mucho ya mori en este manera."

But what really made me write this article was seeing the word apacigua being used in one of TV Patrol Chavacano's posts.


When I was searching for the meaning of the chabacano word acudi, I came across someone saying that apacigua is a synonym of acudi.

I couldn't make any sense of this at first but I realized later on that apacigua and acudi are related to each other since apacigua could be something that you do when you acudi someone. :)

Apacigua obviously comes from apaciguar in Spanish where it means 'to appease'. In the post above this word was used to mean 'to neutralize'. Camins' Chabacano dictionary defines apacigua as 'to appease" or 'to calm' while Santos' Chabacano dictionary defines it as 'to pacify', 'to appease', 'to calm', 'to soothe', 'to succor', and 'to aid'.
 



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