On Mon, 15.10.12 18:15, Colin Guthrie ([email protected]) wrote: > > 'Twas brillig, and Tom Gundersen at 15/10/12 17:57 did gyre and gimble: > > On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 6:14 PM, Andrew Eikum <[email protected]> > > wrote: > >> The trouble is "resp." isn't used in English, ever. > > > > For what it is worth, "resp." is commonly used in mathematics. I don't > > know about technical writing in general though. > > Yeah I've seen it plenty times while going through university, so while > it might not be used in prose, I've never had an issue with this kind of > abbreviation being used in documentation and have always understood it's > meaning. > > That said, the German abbreviation doesn't necessarily translate > directly into an English one, so if there is any doubt just don't > abbreviate it.
Actually the text Andrew listed got one thing wrong too: the loser meaning of "bzw." in the German language is actually wrong in German too. People just use it that way, because German is too hard a language for the German population itself... So, as I see it the correct German usage of "bzw." within a sentence does actually translate 1:1 to the English usage of "respectively" at the end of a sentence. Except that Germans don't know their own language... > As a general rule, I would be against replacing it with a simple "or" as > that really can change the meaning. This is technical documentation and > thus syntax more aligned to common prose is not always desirable. Yes, I actually used "resp." here for a reason, to clarify that the order of explanations is the same as the order of strings/items/directives/words that came first... Lennart -- Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc. _______________________________________________ systemd-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
