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
For many Chabacano speakers who are proud of their heritage, we usually like to think that there was a point in history when people spoke a Chabacano that was absent of any words that were of Philippine origin. But a recently published study titled El Primer Vocabulario del Chabacano de Zamboanga tells us that this may not be true. El Primer Vocabulario del Chabacano de Zamboanga is a paper published by Mauro Fernandez in the Journal of Ibero-Romance Creoles. It contains a list of 188 Chabacano words that a Jesuit missionary named Juan Quintana encountered during his stay in Mercedes. We already know that during the Zamboanga Republic in 1901 , they had already spoken a Chabacano laden with words of Philippine origin. However, the latest data from El Primer Vocabulario del Chabacano de Zamboanga tells us that this phenomenon dates back to at least the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. The list referred to in El Primer Vocabulario