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
The list referred to in El Primer Vocabulario del Chabacano de Zamboanga contains Chabacano words which Fr. Quintana did not understand and which were deemed useful to his colleagues if its meaning had been known. It is interesting to note that at the time of compiling these words, they have already branded our language as Chabacano.
As you can imagine most of these words are from Cebuano and Hiligaynon while some are (unsurprisingly) from Tausug, Samal, Yakan and Subanen. But a few are from unexpected culprits such as Maguindanao, Tiruray, Kapampangan, and *gasp* even Tagalog! For the uninitiated (like me), Tiruray is a language spoken by the Teduray tribe in Mindanao.
At a bank, my mother asked the teller if she could possibly change her peso bills into coins. The teller told her: hende ya... man... abot ma'am (she meant that she didn't have enough coins). Her halting Chabacano and her usage of man abot instead of alcanza made me think that she was probably not fluent in Chabacano and maybe only learned the language recently. But this is how non Chabacano speakers from nearby provinces adapt to our language. They tend to borrow words from their native language when speaking Chabacano. Later, depending on circumstances, the usage of the borrowed word becomes mainstream and is no longer considered as a borrowing. Of course, as times change, some words fall into disuse and as demonstrated in the study even unrecognizable to many people more than a hundred years later.
Since the list was compiled in a time when agriculture played a huge role in the people's lives, a good chunk of the words are related to that field. The list also contains words of Spanish origin but were not familiar to Fr. Quintana as they are old Spanish or dialectal Spanish such as barrumbau and tustus.
Yes, according to the study, tustus is of Spanish origin (probably from the word tostado). Another thing I learned from this study about the word tustus is that it was actually used in Tagalog and Kapampangan up to the eighteenth century (later replaced by tutung). While it is Spanish in origin, it may very well have been the Tagalogs and/or the Kapampangans who brought this word to Zamboanga. The word sabroso also may have its origins in Spanish but was probably incorporated into Chabacano through the Ilonggos (or maybe Spanish speaking Ilonggos?) who had a very significant influence on the language. The website Tagaloglang even claims that this word is Tagalog even though it has definitely fallen into disuse. It is however curious that while the word sabroso means 'savory' in Ilonggo (which is the same as in Standard Spanish), its meaning in Chabacano is 'delicious'.
The manuscripts are housed at the Archivo Histórico de Jesús in Catalonia in two different books called Vocabulario de las principales lenguas del Sur de Mindanao and Catecismo en doce idiomas.
Source: Journal of Ibero-Romance Creoles 10 (2020), 92-184
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