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 ...
Are we living through hyperinflation? Today, I was floored when I saw cans of luncheon meat in a locked shelf at the nearby supermarket.
It instantly reminded me of the 1901 Chabacano conversation between Ticang and Buchang, where they mentioned that during the short-lived Zamboanga Republic, rice was being confiscated, causing severe food shortages.
Moments like these in our history are not hard to imagine because major transitions often bring periods of hyperinflation.
Ticang: Ay! Cosa ya man gane este tiempo! Nunca gayot ya observa carestia como ahora ni ya subi el precio del ganta del arroz hasta cuatro reales.
Buchang: Quilaya uste, cuando el tiempo del Republica ta decomisa todo el arroz y no hay pa pode sembra ninguno cay no sabe pa quita aquel si quilaya ba quita ay queda.
When I first read the word carestia in the dialogues, I did not recognize it from either Spanish or Chabacano. A bien Chabacano colleague in the office later explained that it referred to an increase in the price of goods.
Camins' Chabacano dictionary does not list this word, but it does appear in Santos' where it is defined as shortage, scarcity, dearth, expensiveness, costliness.
Are we about to see the word carestia returning to our everyday vocabulary? Perhaps news outlets and social media pages will start using it more often because we might be witnessing the early signs of hyperinflation today.
From the dialogue, we see how people were thrown off their planting schedules, which contributed to the severe decline in rice production.
Paying four reales for a ganta of rice, which measures 2.5 to 3 kilograms, is almost unimaginable. They probably used a four reales coin minted in Mexico with 90 percent silver content. In today's money, that would be equivalent to more than a thousand pesos.
Imagine living through that today!
By 1901, the Zamboanga Republic (established in 1899) was no longer independent and had become a puppet government under the United States. By 1903, even this puppet administration was dissolved as the United States began taking direct control of Zamboanga.
This dialogue is part of a larger collection from the oldest known text in Chabacano de Zamboanga. The manuscript, which describes the culture of Mindanao, was discovered by Mauro Fernandez, a Linguistics professor at the University of La Coruña in Spain. He presented it at a congress in Stockholm in June 2017 and generously shared these materials with me. I sincerely thank him for allowing me to publish these dialogues which are an important part of Zamboanga's history.
Comments
Post a Comment