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How many days in a fortnight?

AndyP

AndyP

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Obvious isn’t it?
Well, actually no.
This cropped up in an english conversation class that I try and help with.
In fact it depends which counting system the language you speak uses. Two counting systems?! I cried at this point.
There is inclusive counting as used by the Romance language ie latin based and there is exclusive counting as used by Nordic/Germanic languages.
So French, Spanish, Italian, Greek etc all translate a fortnight to FIFTEEN DAYS!!
Engish German, Norwegian, Swedish all translate to fourteen days.

I have had this whole inclusive/exclusive counting thing explained to me a dozen times and my poor brain is still defuddled so I will not try to explain. If you are bored google it and see if you can understand it.:)
 
So, the Beatles were right and there are 8 days in a week. Presumably there are 3 days in a weekend, and 2 days in a day. Makes sense.
 
I used the term "a fortnight " recently in America and who would believe that it’s new to them! But they would probably say it’s 12 days as that’s the number of workdays.
Ian
 
Cabinetman said:
I used the term "a fortnight " recently in America and who would believe that it’s new to them! But they would probably say it’s 12 days as that’s the number of workdays.
Ian
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You mean they only get one day a week off?
 
Cabinetman said:
I used the term "a fortnight " recently in America and who would believe that it’s new to them! But they would probably say it’s 12 days as that’s the number of workdays.
Ian
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Fortnight is not new to Americans. I introduced the term to them in the early 1990s when I moved there. They didn't understand the term then and still didn't understand it when I moved back to the UK ten years later, ha, ha. Never heard of inclusive or exclusive counting though. I'll have to look that one up. Slainte.
 
Fortnight = Fourteen Nights...

That's how I've always understood it, doesn't mean I'm right though...Now whether that includes the days either side making it 15, or not, I don't know. Angle Saxons counted in nights which I believe is the etymology, so it would still only be 14 days/nights. inclusive counting, pah!
 
Cabinetman said:
To be honest that was me trying to be funny, but based on what I’ve seen they do work a lot more hours than we do, their work ethic is very strong, and only two weeks holidays a year!
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Is it a strong work ethic or that workers have far fewer rights than they do in the UK and can be fired without notice, so they have to work as long as they're told because the alternative is no job..?

That's not to say they also don't work hard, but the lack of holidays and rights is more (in my opinion) down to lack of workers rights than a desire to work their socks off for their employers. As always this will not count for everyone so I don't want to generalise too much, I'm sure there are millions of extremely hard working and diligent people.
 
That was the eye opening thing about the US for me when I worked there; I was used to long hours but working on Saturdays seemed pointless as most stock markets were not open but the business did it anyway, and two weeks holiday (which did not apply to me) was ridiculous. But everything was different. In NY the culture bore few similarities to the UK. The Americans had not grown out of the church yet, but had embraced truly massive portion sizes in restaurants. Atlanta was an entirely different country it seemed to me and Chicago, where we had an office, was desolate and felt much more unsafe on the streets than NY. Lots of pro's though and some of the scenery is spectacular.
 
Surely you cannot count a fortnight by saying fourteen nights and also counting the previous day. In our calendar a day begins at midnight and ends one second before midnight 24 hours later. To do otherwise simply confuses the calendar system and everything based on it.
 
You will excuse my French (learnt in Africa, many moons ago), but don’t semaine and hebdomadaire both refer to weeks, and are both based on seven. Yet quinzaine.

Still, if all language were logical it would be dull. Like Esperanto. And we would not be able to laugh at English people trying to pronounce Scottish place names. My own personal favourite is a chap from our London office who pronounced Corstorphine as though it was a place on the Italian lakes.

Mind you, I’m sure there are English place names that I would mess up.
 
from Wiki
Inclusive/exclusive counting are terms used for counting intervals. For inclusive counting the starting point is one; for exclusive counting the starting point is zero. Inclusive counting is usually encountered when dealing with time in Roman calendars and the Romance languages.[4] In the ancient Roman calendar, the nones(meaning "nine") is 8 days before the ides; more generally, dates are specified as inclusively counted days up to the next named day.[4] In the Christian liturgical calendar, Quinquagesima (meaning 50) is 49 days before Easter Sunday. When counting "inclusively", the Sunday (the start day) will be day 1 and therefore the following Sunday will be the eighth day. For example, the French phrase for "fortnight" is quinzaine (15 [days]), and similar words are present in Greek (δεκαπενθήμερο, dekapenthímero), Spanish (quincena) and Portuguese (quinzena). In contrast, the English word "fortnight" itself derives from "a fourteen-night", as the archaic "sennight" does from "a seven-night"; the English words are not examples of inclusive counting. In exclusive counting languages such as English, when counting eight days "from Sunday", Monday will be day 1, Tuesday day 2, and the following Monday will be the eighth day.[citation needed] For many years it was a standard practice in English law for the phrase "from a date" to mean "beginning on the day after that date": this practice is now deprecated because of the high risk of misunderstanding.[5]

Similar counting is involved in East Asian age reckoning, in which newborns are considered to be 1 at birth.
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Easy innit?
 
TrimTheKing said:
Is it a strong work ethic or that workers have far fewer rights than they do in the UK and can be fired without notice, so they have to work as long as they're told because the alternative is no job..?

That's not to say they also don't work hard, but the lack of holidays and rights is more (in my opinion) down to lack of workers rights than a desire to work their socks off for their employers. As always this will not count for everyone so I don't want to generalise too much, I'm sure there are millions of extremely hard working and diligent people.
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My son has told me about the firm working on his in laws property (UK) they work from 9 to 3:30 with an hour for lunch, and this is the kicker A FOUR DAY WEEK ! The boss says it’s because they work really hard - my son says they don’t work any harder than anyone else. Can’t imagine they will be in business for long.
Ian
 
I've just realised that if a carrier offers "1 day delivery" as distinct from Overnight, it usually means the item is in their hands for 1 day with the result that you order an item on day 1, the carrier has it for all of day 2 and you get it on day 3
 
Cabinetman said:
My son has told me about the firm working on his in laws property (UK) they work from 9 to 3:30 with an hour for lunch, and this is the kicker A FOUR DAY WEEK ! The boss says it’s because they work really hard - my son says they don’t work any harder than anyone else. Can’t imagine they will be in business for long.
Ian
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Normal building site hours are 7.30/ 8.00 to 4.00/ 4.30, and I've never come across a building firm which works a 4 day week. I suspect that what your son is seeing is a builder making an excuse to not be on their site full time, then scooting off to work on another.
 
One of my first proper jobs was in a Local Council. I was tasked with working out fireman's pensions. All calculations were manual as there was only one calculator in the office, a mechanical wind up one, and it was in great demand. After a week I had worked out all the ones I had been given and presented them to my boss. He handed them all back saying they were all wrong as I had used 52 weeks in a year and every fool knows there are 52 and a third.
 
You were both wrong, but your boss was more wrong than you.
 
Mike G said:
You were both wrong, but your boss was more wrong than you.
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Apparently for the purposes of Firemans pensions and possibly Local Authority pensions 52 1/3 was the correct figure but it was acquired knowledge as it did not appear to be written down anywhere that I had access to and no one bothered to tell me.
 
It is not unusual to find curious calculations with pensions. My pension is made up from four components albeit each from the same employer when over the years the scheme rules changed.
I found that to get the amounts spot on, each component had to be indexed but the rules into a per year figure, divided by 12 (for months) rounded up to the nearest penny to remove any fractional pennies then multiplied back by 12. Repeat for the other three components and the total could vary by up to 33p per annum. However now I understand the algorithm and have coded it into excel. The amounts are spot on every year which pleases my OCD no end!

In another case I found I could only get some interest figures to work out exactly when I set each year to 365.25 days ie evening out the leap year across the 4 years. I did not have enough data to check if they had included the lack of leap year each century!
 
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