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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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Origins of the Chabacano word 'Gulud'

Would you ever have imagined that the Chabacano word gulud possibly came from Tagalog? Personally, I have only heard this word being used by my cousins from a rural village in Zamboanga city so I always thought of it as a hondo Chabacano word.

However, today I came across this word in Facebook which led me to do some research about it. It turns out that in Tagalog, the word gulod means the top portion of a hill or a mountain. I have never heard the Tagalog word gulod used in all my life until I encountered it in a Facebook post which mentioned of a movie in 1949 titled ang bahay sa lumang gulod.

In Chabacano, the word gulud means 'hill'. The Chabacano dictionary of Santos and Camins spells this word as gulud and defines it as 'hill'. However, I have never heard anybody pronounce this word with a hard 'D' in Chabacano but most old Chabacano speakers who sport a heavy Chabacano accent have a hard time pronouncing the letter 'D' when it is at the end of a word.

The Tagalog word gulod can also mean 'a hill' similar to its Chabacano counterpart.

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