Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

On Thu, 22 Oct 1998, Raymond A. Brown wrote:

> But in modern terminology a holophrase is an unstructured utterance,
> usually a single word, with quite a bit of meaning as when a child might
> say "allgone" meaning 'Look, I've eaten up all my food', "more" meaning 'I
> am still hungry/ greedy, give me more food', or when my elder grandson used
> to call out 'Le pot, le pot!' meaning "I need to use the lavatory (toilet,
> rest room etc) very urgently".
>
> Some holophrastic utterances remain common in adult speech, e.g. please,
> sorry, thanks.
>
> Indeed, one can nicely see the difference between holophrasis and
> polysynthesis in:
>
> English holophrastic: "please"
> French po;ysynthetic: "s'il te plait" [silt@plE] /
>                        "s'il vous plait" [silvuplE]
So, a holophrase can take an argument,
as in "allgone shoe!" or "ticket, please?" ?
Then it would seem like an idiomatic formula.

Jesperson said that "originally" languages would
have been "holophrastic." On the auxlang list,
we tried to make sense of this, and failed (I think).