German has this too, “beziehungsweise”, but it replaces the “and” instead of being added to it. It is common enough that it’s usually abbreviated “bzw.”.
Comment on What's the weirdest thing in english?
Nemo@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Per formal linguistics, it’s “respectively”.
Like: Bob, Alicia, and Siobhan are a teacher, plumber, and electrician, respectively.
We know this means Bob is a teacher and Siobhan is an electrician, but trying to write rules for how English works that account for this usage is thorny.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
loppy@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
I don't understand what the issue is/could be. "Respectively" is clearly functioning syntactically as an adverb, and the sentence "Bob, Alicia, and Siobhan are a teacher, plumber, and electrician" without the "respectively" is a valid sentence where its two noun phrases happen to be conjunctions of other nouns.
A sentence like "Bob, Alicia, and Siobhan are a teacher, plumber, electrician, and an astronaut, respectively" is equally valid syntactically, it's just invalid semantically.
Dookieman12@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Let me try writing a rule for it.
“Given two lists, the word “respectively” indicates the n-th item in each list corresponds to the n-th item in the other list.”
Nemo@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
It’s not that it’s hard to write a rule for “respectively”. It’s that it needs its own rule, specifically. The general rules don’t cover it.