#Fort. Night.
spare idol
meager ginkgo
quinze => fifteen
une quinzaine de ... => a group of fifteen or around fifteen
"quinze" is an adjective. Goes before the noun to qualify it.
"quinzaine" is a noun, it works independantly, but you can use "de" to give additional information about what it is a group of.
There are a number of similar words in French: dizaine (10), douzaine (12), vingtaine (20), trentaine (30), centaine (100), millier (1000), etc...
You have a pretty direct equivalent in English for "douzaine" which is "dozen", although it might be less used
fossil trout
Désolée, I accidentally deleted it. I was looking for the french translation for "fortnight" (two weeks).
meager ginkgo
Désolée, I accidentally deleted it. I was looking for the french translation fo...
there is to my knowledge no single word with that exact meaning.
apparently "quinzaine" can have that meaning, I assume that's why you asked, but I basically never heard it being used without indicating "quinzaine de jours".
There also is the term bimensuel for something that happens twice a month (every two weeks)
-# also unlike English where bimonthly can mean either twice a month or every two month, bimensuel always means twice a month, where bimestriel means every two months
also @fossil trout can you rephrase your second question about registers please
fossil trout
Re: 2nd question
I was having trouble writing the question ("Pourquoi je ne puis pas dire "...") into soutenu/familier, so I wrote my attempts at it. I assumed the original is already proper courant.
meager ginkgo
Re: 2nd question
I was having trouble writing the question ("Pourquoi je ne puis...
first of, "pouvoir" is a weird one.
in present tense, with "je", it has two conjugations: "peux" and "puis"
but they're not interchangeable. "puis" happens with inversion, otherwise "peux" is used (assuming you don't dip into old French)
polar aurora
meager ginkgo
you're right that you'd probably use inversion in formal language: "pourquoi ne puis-je pas dire"
"pourquoi je (ne) peux pas dire", and "je (ne) peux pas dire [...], pourquoi ?" are the same register, you're just changing the structure. (why X / X, why is that)
They are both common register. You can also make your question using "est-ce que" like "pourquoi est-ce que je (ne) peux pas dire" which is very slighty more formal but still common.
Familiar language rarely comes from grammatical constructions
Additional note: "vrai" means "true". While there are cases where it matches "right" as a translation (that's right => c'est vrai) because right basically means true, in the case "are they right/correct?" it doesn't work
outer junco
-# also unlike English where bimonthly can mean either twice a month or every tw...
-# You mean bimonthly
-# Biweekly is either twice a week or once every two weeks
meager ginkgo
-# You mean bimonthly
-# Biweekly is either twice a week *or* once every two wee...
right but I was thinking there's the issue for every similar word 😭 I hate this in English
like the words are useless!! you can never use them without explaining what they mean
outer junco
Like with quinzaine because from what I remember it’s a holdover from old Roman inclusive counting where you also include the day you’re starting at
For example, it’s Saturday for me right now. If I say ‘three days from now’, I’m referring to Tuesday because I’m counting Sunday, Monday, Tuesday
For the Ancient Romans, today also counts as a day so for them it would’ve been Monday since they would be counting Saturday, Sunday, Monday.
So two weeks (fortnight) is fifteen days because it’s fourteen days plus the day on which you start counting
meager ginkgo
eh, most people I know use it thinking "yeah it's not fourteen days but close enough it's a rounder number"