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The term itself, he said, can’t be explained to someone who doesn’t speak the Lakota language, which is “esoteric, conceptual and holophrastic,” meaning that a phrase or an entire sentence is expressed by a single word.

Holophrastic, hol-o-fras′tik, adj. bearing the force of a whole phrase, expressive of a sentence or an idea.—n.

Philology also leads us back to that state when the animate and the inanimate were confounded, for the holophrastic roots into which words are finally resolved show us that all inanimate things were represented in language as actors.

Various scholars have called attention to this feature by describing Indian languages as being holophrastic, polysynthetic, or synthetic.

From these and other considerations it is supposed that an analysis of the original conceptions of gestures, studied together with the holophrastic roots in the speech of the gesturers, may aid in the ascertainment of some relation between concrete ideas and words.