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interweaving together the most significant sounds or syllables of each simple word, so as to form a compound that will awaken in the mind at once all the ideas singly expressed by the words from which they are taken. -Duponceau
Polysynthetic
Languages that are so inflected that a sentence can consist of a single highly inflected word (such as many Native American languages) are called polysynthetic languages.
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Difrasismo is a term derived from Spanish that is used in the study of certain Mesoamerican languages, to describe a particular grammatical construction in which two separate words are paired together to form a single metaphoric unit. This semantic and stylistic device was commonly employed throughout Mesoamerica,[1] and features notably in historical works of Mesoamerican literature, in languages such as Classical Nahuatl and Classic Maya.
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Nahuatl, both written and spoken, is what’s called an ‘agglutinative’ language, that is, it contains many words that are combinations of two or more shorter words ‘glued together’ to form new ones. Many languages around the world are agglutinative - English isn’t one of them.
Mexiclore
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polysynthetic_language
I have explained elsewhere what I mean by a polysynthetic or syntactic construction of language.... It is that in which the greatest number of ideas are comprised in the fewest words. This is done principally in two ways. 1. By a mode of compounding locutions which is not confined to joining two words together, as in the Greek, or varying the inflection or termination of a radical word as in the most European languages, but by interweaving together the most significant sounds or syllables of each simple word, so as to form a compound that will awaken in the mind at once all the ideas singly expressed by the words from which they are taken. 2. By an analogous combination of various parts of speech, particularly by means of the verb, so that its various forms and inflections will express not only the principal action, but the greatest possible number of the moral ideas and physical objects connected with it, and will combine itself to the greatest extent with those conceptions which are the subject of other parts of speech, and in other languages require to be expressed by separate and distinct words.... Their most remarkable external appearance is that of long polysyllabic words, which being compounded in the manner I have stated, express much at once.
— (Duponceau 1819: xxx–xxxi)
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An important feature of this high rhetorical style of formal oratory was the use of parallelism,[139] whereby the orator structured their speech in couplets consisting of two parallel phrases. For example:
ye maca timiquican
'May we not die'
ye maca tipolihuican
'May we not perish'[140]
Another kind of parallelism used is referred to by modern linguists as difrasismo, in which two phrases are symbolically combined to give a metaphorical reading. Classical Nahuatl was rich in such diphrasal metaphors, many of which are explicated by Sahagún in the Florentine Codex and by Andrés de Olmos in his Arte.[141] Such difrasismos include:[142]
in xochitl, in cuicatl
'The flower, the song' – meaning 'poetry'
in cuitlapilli, in atlapalli
'the tail, the wing' – meaning 'the common people'
in toptli, in petlacalli
'the chest, the box' – meaning 'something secret'
in yollohtli, in eztli
'the heart, the blood' – meaning 'cacao'
in iztlactli, in tencualactli
'the drool, the spittle' – meaning 'lies'
Wiki
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages,[1] are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages. Polysynthetic languages typically have long "sentence-words" such as the Yupik word tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq.
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The term was made popular in a posthumously published work by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836),[2] and it was long considered that all the indigenous languages of the Americas were of the same type. Humboldt considered language structure to be an expression of the psychological stage of evolution of a people, and since Native Americans were considered uncivilized, polysynthesis came to be seen as the lowest stage of grammatical evolution, characterized by a lack of rigorous rules and clear organization known in European languages. Duponceau himself had argued that the complex polysynthetic nature of American languages was a relic of a more civilized past, and that this suggested that the Indians of his time had degenerated from a previous advanced stage. Duponceau's colleague Albert Gallatin contradicted this theory, arguing rather that synthesis was a sign of a lower cultural level, and that while the Greek and Latin languages were somewhat synthetic, Native American languages were much more so – and consequently polysynthesis was the hallmark of the lowest level of intellectual evolution.[12
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Notes: the brag of James Joyce fans is that in Finnegans Wake he coined words over a hundred letters long...hmmph, this may have been common in pre-Columbian polysynthetic American languages-Hawaiian too!...aaand, way back in the 18th Century, linguistic scholars thought polysynthetic words were like an artifact of an ancient civilization's language-or not, that rather it was a tell of a new, or primitive language...welp, let me wade into that, tho it's all over my head-on looking at dialect, I thought of how I write, which is elliptical, like sports talk/writing...searched up: sports talk dialect...and it is just so, American English, at least what is heard on the medias, is like shrinking, abbreviating- constrained like sports reporting to say much in short time...more on that for sometime...and more on compounding words in Nahuatl, how the pre-Columbian Americans spoke and thought...Nahuatl is special as it was a written language, but like all the oral American languages, in grammar, and lore-study of it a gateway to all the others...Nahuatl codexes are actually a combination of words and pictures that needed a narrator, a grown up, sorta speak, explaining a word and picture book to their children...this is a long riff!...polysynthetic!
Aloha,
🙂
DavidDavid
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