Since + [time period]

[A. Maberry]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2000 Mark_Mandel at DRAGONSYS.COM wrote:

> Tom Kysilko <pds at VISI.COM> writes:
>
> >>>>>
>      [...]          "The two
> governments have been working on a joint proposal since three weeks."
>
> <<<<<
>
> 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.
>

German maybe, Yiddish maybe not. Yiddish doesn't have a prepostion that
corresponds exactly to the German "seit". In fact Weinreich's dictionary
s.v. "for"  states that "elapsed time *omitted*-- I waited for 2 days Ikh
hob gevart tsvey teg.
The above would probably come out as "Zey hobn gearbet dray vokhn" German:
"seit drei Wochen"

Allen
maberry at u.washington.edu