Since + [time period]

[Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM]

Tom Kysilko <pds at VISI.COM> writes:

>>>>>
     [...]          "The two
governments have been working on a joint proposal since three weeks."

Am I right in thinking that one would rarely, if ever, hear this from an
American?  My sense is that the object of prepositional "since" is a more
or less specific date, time, or event; not a time period, especially not an
enumerated time period.

since this morning
since Easter
since he was elected
since three weeks after he was elected
since three weeks ago  (?)

Indeed, is this locution even common in contemporary British English?  [It
makes me think of those Jane Austen emulators, who lard their prose with
"these three weeks".  Yes, they occur in the Austen corpus, but not very
often.]
<<<<<

Sounds like an L2 calque to me. "il y a trois semaines". Yiddish, too, maybe?

Then, o'course, the question is how it got into the mouth of a BBC newsreader.

   Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist and Manager of Acoustic Data
         Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Dragon Systems, Inc.
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/
                     (speaking for myself)