Chavacano love poem
Espejo
El dituyo porma na espejo
Mas bien bonito palabra de poema
No tarda apura ay perde se
Este el mi ultimo quire yo kontigo!
→ French poem ←
Chavacano language
This chavacano love poem (other possibles names : Davaoeño, Ermiteño, Davao Chavacano, Zamboangueño, Ternateño Chavacano, Cotabateño, Davaweño, Chabacano, Chabakano, Caviteño, Cotabato Chavacano, Davaweño Zamboangueño, Ternateño, Ermitaño, Abakay Spanish), has been translated for her.
Chavacano is a Spanish Creole spoken among others in Zamboanga, Ermita, Cavite and Davao, in the Philippines. A little over 1 million speakers speak this broken Spanish, and will be able to understand my poem in Chabacano.
The word chavacano stands for clumsy in Spanish, and unlike many languages that share the same name, as the ethnicity that speaks them, the word Chavacano only refers to the language.
It is important to note that the Chavacano, is not the language of an ethnic group, but the consolidation, of different languages, of different places, Creolized or on Creolized Spanish, which served as the lingua franca in the Spanish era.
The negative connotation of the word ended up fading and being forgotten, and for someone from Zamboanga, before being the Chavacano language, it is the language of Zamboanga that he speaks.
This Creole even has several dialects, which are besides the Zamboangueño, the Caviteño, the Cotabateño, the Castellano, the Ternateño, and the Ermiteño.
Chavacano has many elements coming from the Tagalog and Cebuano vocabularies, and one of its specificities is the fact that positive adjectives tend to come from Spanish and negative ones from Filipino.
It should be noted that with the exception of Chavacano, which is a Spanish Creole, all the indigenous languages of the Philippines are Austronesian.
For Whinnom, Chavacano can be divided into four dialects, spoken respectively in: Ermita, Cavite, Zamboanga and Davao.
When the Spaniards arrived at Ternate in the Moluccas, 32 years after the Portuguese, Malay and Portuguese were the two contact languages in the eastern seas, and the lingua franca, which they encountered, was a pidgin of the Portuguese.
But is it from this pigin that the Spanish Creole of the Philippines will be developed?
Still according to Whinnom, it is the meeting of Spanish soldiers, often Mexican half-breeds, with the natives of Ternate, which is at the origin of this idiom. According to Whinnom, this Portuguese pidgin, was probably not intelligible to these illiterate soldiers ... I readily believe it, and it must be said that from these contacts, rather emerged a new language, through mixed marriages, which have been the real driving force for the proliferation of this new Creole.
In 1631 to protect the priests, the army was sent to Zamboanga; thus began to be born the Zamboangueño dialect. Later, Zamboanga becoming the main Spanish military base, the development of its dialect was assured, and the contribution of soldiers of Visayan origin would give it certain peculiarities.
Even later we will see the emergence of another dialect, since in 1900, many people from Zamboanga will be transferred to Davao, city in which Davaueño will emerge.
Between these two dates, in 1663, the Spanish garrison, with 200 Creole-speaking families emerging from Ternate, traveled from Ternate to Ermita, then to Cavite, encountering Tagalog-speaking natives, with some of them drafted into the troop. So from Ternateño will begin to emerge two dialects, Ermitaño and Caviteño.
We can therefore say that this language is mainly spoken by mixed families, who descend from Spanish soldiers who came in the 17th century and after, and from families in contact with these families.