In the July/August 2017 issue, I wrote 'Speaking in Tongues'
(https://freelancetraveller.com/features/rules/dialect.html), which
discussed "playing" with English to represent dialects of Galanglic. For
the most part, the ideas involved minor changes to word order and word
choice.

This works for most cases, but what if you want something more? Usually,
you're going to need to stick to English, so how do you make a character
seem _alien_, but not completely incomprehensible?

One modification of speech patterns that I did not discuss in the published
article - because I hadn't thought about it at the time - is _holophrasis_.

Holophrasis is defined as the use of a single word to express complex
ideas. It is often seen in preliterate children, e.g., demanding a ball
with the single word 'ball!', or refusing to share a favored toy by taking
it from another chiled with a shout of 'mine!'.

It's not limited to the prelinguistic, however; arguably, the labelling of
'tweets', SMS messages, or even longer posts on forums or chats with
"hashtags" can be considered an example of holophrasis: you have
(generally) a single word (which may be a neologism) that, by itself,
establishes a semantic context for the rest of the message, and which can
in isolation be taken _as_ a message.

Closer to the prelinguistic use is some forms of 'mangling' a language by
people first learning it, who don't have the grammar or vocabulary to
express themselves in a language the way a fluent (or even competent)
speaker of the language might. This is what you get when the tourist walks
into a pastry shop, sees a familiar pastry (e.g., what you or I might call
a jelly donut) and indicates that s/he wants one by pointing to it and
saying 'cake?'.

In its most general sense, we can say that holophrasis involves abstracting
the most important fundamental (or "core") concepts out of more complex
ideas, and using the symbology for those core concepts to "stand in" for
the entire idea. In such a mode, the abstraction will be highly
context-dependent, and may not be unambiguous.

So, How Do I Do Holophrasis?

Some of the discussion above should give you some ideas. In general,
though, I'd suggest such changes as leaving verbs unconjugated, using
simple nouns for adjectives of relevant qualities, eliminating most
pronouns and grammatical particles, and stringing simple nouns and verbs
together to represent more complex ideas (e.g., any building might become
"house"; a school might be "house give think", that is, a building where
one obtains knowledge). The constructed language Blissymbolics (often just
called Bliss) is built around this technique; one could do worse than
"translate" an idea into Bliss and then pick the core meanings of the main
Bliss-characters (Bliss _does_ have symbols for grammatical person and
number; you'd ignore these), decomposing the "complex Bliss-words" into
simple Bliss-words and using their meanings glossed back into English.

(comments? Expansions?)

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