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-等國

Huang–Shi §3.5.1.1:

英法等國 … 'countries like England and France.' … a case of conventionalized contextual ellipsis.

Both the gloss and the analysis are wrong. They illustrate some of the commonest pitfalls in synchronic analysis:

  1. The elided part must be unambiguously specified.
  2. No attention is paid to paradigmatic alternants like -等地, where a semantically equivalent full form is not in use. Cf. 英法等國 vs 英法等國家 with 台北上海等地 vs #台北上海等地區 vs #台北上海等地方 vs 台北上海等城市.
  3. No attention is paid to more established alternants such as 各國 (1602) and 各地 (1822), from which -等國 and -等地 are created by analogy.

英法等國 should be glossed as 'Britain and France' (等 as marker of asyndetic coordination) or 'Britain, France and other countries' (等 as abbreviatory device).