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 ...
It probably looks weird to you written that way but this is a word that we use almost everyday in Chabacano. For most of us, we spell this word as sapa and for good reason since that is the way that we pronounce it.
Yes, folks I have reason to believe that the Chabacano word sapa and the Spanish word zafar are one and the same. The DRAE defines this word as either:
1. Desembarazar, libertar, quitar los estorbos de algo.
2. Soltar o desatar algo.
3. Descoser una costura o una prenda de ropa.
4. Desentenderse, librarse de un compromiso o de una obligación.
5. Escaparse o esconderse para evitar un encuentro o riesgo.
6. Librarse de una molestia.
7. Excusarse de hacer algo.
8. Dicho de la correa de una máquina: Salirse del canto de la rueda.
9. Dicho de un hueso: Dislocarse o descoyuntarse.
Zafa is a word that we use in Chabacano when something gets removed without direct action from the speaker. For example a painting falling off the wall or a stain that disappeared.
Over the past few days, I kept noticing that this Chabacano word does not really have an equivalent in English. When a painting gets removed from a wall without help from anyone, one would say that it fell or if it were a stain, then it disappeared, If you say ya zafa el mio hambre in Chabacano, there really is no way of translating that into English and sounding natural because in English this would roughly be translated as my hunger was removed (disappeared).
In Tagalog, this word could be translated as natanggal. Of course there are other words that we can use depending on the context such as nawala. Even the word zafa in the sentence above about hunger can be substituted with ya perde.
If something was intentionally removed, we use the same root word in Tagalog but conjugated differently: tinanggal. In Chabacano, we use the word: quita.
For example:
Intentional: Ya quita yo con el mancha na de mio camisa.
Unintentional: Ya zafa el mancha na de mio camisa.
You can also probably get away with using the word zafa even when something was removed intentionally by adding the word hace (hace zafa) however, it does not work all the time.
Camins' Chabacano dictionary spells this word as sapa and defines it as 'to detach'.
In case you were wondering what led me to write about this word, my dental filling broke after some heavy chicharron eating sessions and since I had to tell my friends about it in English, Tagalog, and Chabacano, I made some interesting observations on the Chabacano word zafa.
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