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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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Is This The Chabacano Prototype?

A few weeks ago, I discovered a channel in YouTube which featured a Filipino from Nueva Ecija working in Equatorial Guinea. I was very fascinated upon observing how the vlogger's Spanish sounded very much like Chabacano. Professing himself that he doesn't speak the language well, he tends to use only infinitives and I think he also tends to think in Tagalog and translate that into Spanish.


All this was very interesting to me not just because of how the vlogger's Spanish tend to sound like Chabacano but also because of some similarities between his and my former co-workers' experiences. I remember I had a co-worker who learned Spanish when she worked in Spain say to me that she started out not being able to conjugate verbs and simply using infinitives. In the case of a different co-worker who used to work in Guatemala, I noticed that he got away with not conjugating verbs by using fue/fui + a for past tense and va/voy + a for future tense.


It's quite amazing how similar his sentence construction is to Chabacano. For example when asking someone's age, he asks cuantos años tu while in Chabacano we say cuanto año (ya) tu? This is the same as the Tagalog ilang taon ka (na)? He also asks a colleague cuanto tu salario while in Chabacano we would say cuanto tu or tuyo sueldo. To me this sounds like the Tagalog magkano (ang) sweldo mo? He even greets like in Chabacano saying buenOs dias instead of buenAs dias.


In one of his videos, he asks a woman donde tu casa which is exactly how we would say it in Chabacano. I also noticed that he would omit the usage of es and use no hay to say that someone is not present just like in Chabacano! One of the commenters in his channel who mentioned that he was from Zamboanga city said that he could understand the vlogger's Spanish perfectly. It's true, I think that if Chabacano speakers were to watch that video, they would have almost zero difficulty understanding his Spanish.


Of course we all have heard of the theory that Chabacano developed as an intermediary language between natives and Spaniards but I chose that title merely as a click bait. 😆

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