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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 'Tulun'

I remember when I was a kid, I often used the word man tulun. At that time, my brother and I were left with my maternal grandmother whose native tongue was Cebuano during summer breaks when we didn't have school. My maternal grandmother is a migrant from Zamboanga Del Norte who learned to speak Chabacano and Tausug in Zamboanga city. After a couple of summers, my parents decided to leave us with my paternal grandmother (perhaps because my maternal grandmother got too weary of me and my brother). It was then that I stopped using man tulun because I was constantly told that the correct Chabacano word was traga.

This was a word that my brother and I would use frequently in our childhood but have already forgotten about in adulthood. Having remembered it out of the blue, I decided to write about it. To be honest, I haven't even heard anybody use this word while I was growing up. I figured that maybe my grandmother was just borrowing that word from Cebuano (tulon) when we heard her use it. But I was very surprised when I checked Santos' Chabacano dictionary and found the word tulun which he lists as tulun, man and defines as: to swallow food whole.

Camins' Chabacano dictionary also contains the word tulun and even gives us a very graphic definition: to swallow food whole like the way a snake does (hey, just like the Boa Constrictor in The Little Prince 😀).

"El maga boa constrictor hende ta man usang y ta traga sila entero con el de ila comida." - El Diutay Principe

So it turns out that tulun IS a Chabacano word and may not even be a synonym of traga. Although I think I can remember that my grandmother uses that word to mean 'to swallow' which is the same as its Cebuano meaning. 

And not only is tulun a Chabacano word but it had actually been in use since 1883! While writing this article, I incidentally came across this word in a paper published in the Journal of Ibero-Romance Creoles 10 (2020), 92-184 which contains a list of words that a Jesuit priest had trouble understanding and compiled in two different books called Vocabulario de las principales lenguas del Sur de Mindanao and Catecismo en doce idiomas.

In the study, Mauro Fernandez also lists Hiligaynon and Samal as possible origins of the Chabacano word tulun.

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