http://penanghokkien.com/?p=1030&cpage=1#comment-19986
and they started wondering why some people said tang-che instead of tang-cheh, which was what I'd learnt first.
My first instinct was to write this:
But after I got hold of my dictionaries I found I was wrong, and corrected it with this.I’d been talking with Sim about tang-che/tang-cheh just last week and I’d always assumed it was a difference between 冬至 and 冬節 but as Ah-long said, the 至 is pronounced chi (= pinyin ji). I think the Hokkien term was originally the second one and it lost its final -h (I see people often hear it as a -k, actually the -h is just a convention for writing the clipped sound at the end of the short vowel) because of confusion with the first one in Taiwan and Amoy. I’ll go and check some of my other dictionaries when I get my hands on them tonight.
I wonder what people say in different places? Apparently the old Penang term for Christmas was ang-mO-tang-che 紅毛冬節. I'm sure in Amoy and Taiwan they'll just use the Mandarin word pronounced as Hokkien.Tracked it down last night! The che in tang-che is 祭 (Mandarin ji4 or zhai4) meaning “sacrifice”. It’s an old classical word for a festival that the Japanese still use a lot (they pronounce it “matsuri”). My old “Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy” has che-tang “To make sacrifices at the Winter solstice” .
Anyway, Happy red-hair-winter-festival to everyone!
