A quixotic and doomed project, I’m afraid. But never mind: languages stay alive by growing in the compost of their dead words.
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Is this English? 
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Ah, good, something else I can throw into the compost bin. I hope it’s good for tomatoes. 
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I’m American and have always known what fortnight means, but I’m also a child of 2 WASP English professor parents. I think at one point the word was used here but now would be considered archaic.
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Yeah nah its ridgy-didge ozzie.
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Australian translation -
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Okay, but what of the classic “yeah nah yeah”?
In the classic ‘yeah nah yeah’ (also commonly observed as yeah nah, but yeah’) the additional pre-modifiers serve to illustrate the active speakers uncertainty or to soften the phrase structure.
The meaning is conveyed by the final active ‘yeah’ or ‘nah’ respectively, and additional pre-modifiers may be added, interspersed with ‘but’ as necessary to further accent the final word.
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I use “half-month.” The problem with fortnight is that it is too precise, meaning exactly 14 days. The Buddhist addhāmāsa, “a half-month,” on the other hand, is derived from the astronomical half-month, and this varies between 14 and 15 days. This matters in a vinaya context, and because of this I prefer “half-month” regardless. That it is not understood by North Americans, and presumably ESL speakers who have been primarily exposed to North American English, just adds weight to this.
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Hi Bhante
Although half-month is not a term that is naturally/commonly used in any English speaking country, as far as I know.
It would seem that an “astronomical half-month” refers to the the first 15 days and then the remaining days of a Gregorian calendar month. Half-month - Wikipedia
I guess the choice would be one of style rather than accuracy.
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Excuse me, but if you persist with such nonsense I’m going to have to inform Queenie!
From the OED:
##crikey, int.
Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈkrʌɪki/, U.S. /ˈkraɪki/
Forms: 18 cricky, 18 crykey, 18– crikey, 19– crickey. See also crackey int.
Frequency (in current use): Band 2 [out of 8]
Origin: Probably a variant or alteration of another lexical item. Etymon: CHRIST n.
Etymology: Probably a euphemistic alteration of CHRIST n. Compare CRIVENS int., and similarly OD n.1, AD n.2, ODSO int., GOSH n., DOG n.2, COCK n.8, etc. Perhaps compare CRIMINY int.
colloq. (orig. Brit.).
Expressing surprise. Also by crikey. Cf. gosh n.
1826 J. KERR Rip Van Winkle ii. i. 42 “Eh, by crikey! what’s all this? Where am I in the name of goodness—where am I?”
1827 in Catal. Prints: Polit. & Personal Satires (Brit. Mus.) (1952) X. 718 “He says: Oh! Crimine, Crykey! you shall have my Ginger-bread Crown.”
1842 R. H. BARHAM Auto-da-fé in Ingoldsby Legends 2nd Ser. 77 “It would make you exclaim…if an Englishman, Crikey!”
1884 Harper’s Mag. Oct. 693/1 “Cricky! didn’t she go it, though!”
1922 J. JOYCE Ulysses ii. x. [Wandering Rocks] 217 “Crickey, is there nothing for us to eat?”
1960 J. RAE Custard Boys i. i. 16 “Crikey, I thought, he’s tough.”
1992 B. ANDERSON Portrait of Artist’s Wife (1993) iv. 73 “We’re not happy, by crikey we’re not. Not by a long shot. Who would be?”
2000 S. KINSELLA Secret Dreamworld of Shopaholic xvii. 237 “I jauntily replied, ‘Of course!’ and nearly added, ‘In fact, I’ll have it with you in five minutes’ time!’ Then, just in time, I realized he was serious. Crikey.”
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Strewth!
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Don’t think the OED will have anything for that.
Added:
I stand corrected. Earliest listed use:
1892 R. KIPLING Barrack-room Ballads 20 “Mad drunk and resisting the Guard—'Strewth, but I socked it them hard!”
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“Fortnight” is a very common word in Irish English. “Biweekly” sounds strange to me (I’d wonder whether, like “biannual”, it can mean both twice a week or every two weeks). “Half-month” has the benefit of being clear and easily understandable everywhere though.
As an aside, Irish English is, in some ways, closest in pronunciation in the British Isles to American English. I think English became established here at a similar time to the US. Pronunciation is as likely to follow the US way as the English way, e.g. we’d pronounce “wasp” and “bath” in the US way with a flatter “a” (the “Queen’s English” and its higher “a” sounds seemingly was a later development).
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English is not my mother tongue, but still - I have used it to communicate, and even to write books, - not knowing that fortnight was a suspect word, unknown to Americans. I was probably taught “British English”, as a child and later.
I suggest that there is no need to remove the term from your translations, Americans will not be the only readers. English is the third most frequent language of the world (after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish). Instead you can supply a list of words not used American English, if you want. -()-
I should have associated "effluent " with “affluent” in a general way.
“How comes You did not know this, bhante?” ----- Obviously you learned English in a setting were fortnight was known and used as meaning “two weeks”.
I hope you do NOT replace it by strange terms like “bi-weekly” (which I never heard before) or “bi-monthly” (which should mean “every two months”- but it was used in my friends’ book for the regular occurence of the Paatimokkha recitation. I was given this book for revision, and replaced the term by “every fortnight”.
---- I agree that “a.d.dha-maasa” means “half-month”, but why should “pakkha” mean “a forthnight”? “pakkha” is more specific than that, because a fortnight which includes a full moon of a new moon in the middle of the period, cannot be a “pakkha”. It must be either ‘the bright side’ of the month, or the ‘dark side’.
… Note that the word “week” is absent in the sequence found in your quotation. Instead of it the word “pakkha” (fortnights) appears. Obviously the ancient Indian way of counting periods of time during the year ways different from our present usage.
Please don’t translate “pakkha” as “bi-weekly”. This English word was unknown to me, though I have used English as a second laguage for nearly 65 years. But I would have guessed it to mean “twice a week” on the analogy of “biannual” “every two years” (compare: biennale). “moon-phase” seems to a fitting translation for “pakkha”.
In German we have two expression for a fortnight a) vierzehn Tage (14 days), and 2) zwei Wochen (2 weeks).