Ramai

Preface to the original 1886 edition

Dr. Charles Albert (1807-1870) received his education at Westbrook Seminary, in Portland, Maine U.S.A. and later at Cambridge University in England. His field notes regarding the Erōikāma people and the Ramai language which they speak were discovered shortly after his sudden disappearance in 1870. They were never formally collated and edited until this 1886 edition.

Throughout his career as a theologist, philosopher and amateur linguist, Dr. Albert maintained to close friends and family that he had discovered an alternative world as he called it. Being a man of Christian morals; these claims were dismissed as fantasy and his sanity was brought into question by the Church in Maine where he resided. After 1865, Dr. Albert ceased speaking publically about his alternative world and the stories he told about it were largely forgotten and blamed on stress and his somewhat-childish imagination. However, in 1870, at the age of 63, Dr. Albert went missing from his Portland home and was never seen again. It was believed at the time that he may have slipped from the bank of the Kennebec river and drowned while walking with his dog. His body has never been recovered.

In 1871, after his family disposed of his estate, a folio of hand-written papers were discovered and donated to Westbrook Seminary. This large collection contained several notebooks in which he described his alternative world and the people who inhabited it which he claimed he had met on numerous occasions while visiting.

The truth behind his claims are still disputed and disowned by the community to which he belong lest they be construed as heretical and un-Christian. However, there are some who feel that his notes and papers were far too detailed and complete to be the muddled ramblings of an insane man. They believe that there is more than a grain of truth in the claims and have striven to either prove, or disprove, that Dr. Albert was right.

This work, is therefore presented to you, the reader, as a more coherrent presentation of Dr. Albert’s notes. It makes no claims of vality or truth but is merely presented here for the reader to arrive at his own conclusions.

The Ramai People

On the Speakers of the Language

I traveled frequently through what I shall call a dimensional-portal, for I have no other way to describe it, which carried me between the world I accepted as real and mine; and an alternative world belonging to people not of my Earth! So begins the lengthy diary Dr. Charles Albert kept on the subject. The author found himself inexplicably able to commute between the world we know and accept, and the world of the Erōikāma people. This inter-dimensional world is much different from ours although it appears to be similar in its most basic of physics and science. The whereabouts of this so-called dimensional-portal were never uncovered by Dr. Albert yet there are those who knew him that claim to have information not released to the world at-large. At this time, all work on the Ramai language and the people who speak it, remains rooted in Dr. Alberts extensive scribblings.

The Erōikāma people are not an ethnic group unto themselves but form more of a tribe to which most of the people in the area belong. They inhabit a large swathe of land stretching several miles north to south and east to west. The larger land in which they reside is itself is known as Rāmmuo, a name which translates loosely as the land of the Ramai-speakers.

Rāmmuo appears to be a largely homogenous territory, and everyone the author claims to have come into contact with, both from the Erōikāma and from other tribes, seem both linguistically, and ethnically, related. Further exploration and investigation would be necessary before a definitive conclusion can be drawn on that topic and no anthropologist nor biologist has yet had the opportunity to study these people.

To our modern eyes, the inhabitants of Rāmmuo seems to be a largely primitive folk and the group the author is most familiar with live mostly in communities hidden away in the dense woodland surrounding the so-called Hiraroku (the Long Trail), a lengthy and well-worn path through the forest.

However, to label these people primitive is perhaps unfair and one could closely compare these people to both the Maya of Meso-America and the Inca civilizations of South America. They fashion tools from metal, domesticate animals and cultivate crops. They are aware of their world and travel freely not only within their own borders but without as well. They tend to make their homes in small villages scattered throughout clearings in the forest. Usually one extended family will live in a single house and claim ownership to a small piece of land surrounding it. On the edges of the forest, the Erōikāma domesticate animals and farm crops. Fishing the surrounding waters is also important to their livelihood.

Although they are not the most comfortable of sea-faring people, they do sail ships across the Inner Sea where they trade with the Ovaniyan people. The Erōikāma people are the focus of this work although the linguistic contents could, it seems, apply equally to any inhabitant of this land.

The Nasai

Dr. Albert left a hand-drawn map in his folio. It draws upon several sources and is quite detailed. On it, he mentioned a second local group, seemingly related to the first, who inhabit a flat open area he refers to in his notes as The Nascant. This second group of people call themselves Nasai (the very name Nascant would appear to come from a rough transliteration meaning a border or edge of the Nasai people). Many of the Nasai also live in forested areas and build houses in the same fashion as the Erōikāma but the majority of them live in larger settlements, such as the town which Dr. Albert called Pichuhakka.

The Nasai prefer building more substantial homes than the Erōikāma, usually from stone rather than wood, arranged around a central location. These settlements are usually made up of unrelated families. The Nasai are considered to be more technologically advanced as well as superior farmers and often trade their goods with the Erōikāma in exchange for fish and wood products.

On the Culture of the Erōikāma

From what this author has experienced and witnessed, the Erōikāma are both spiritual, somewhat religious and heavily bound by tradition and family. Ritual plays a large part of each day with many activities and processes being undertaken almost without second-thought. Understanding the culture of these people has been key in understanding their language for one cannot fully appreciate one without the other.

There is a strict hierarchy among the Ramai-speaking people which divides them into large groups, though tribes would perhaps be a better term to use. Those who have studied the history and culture of native American peoples might think in terms of Nations when parceling these people into groups.

The Ramai Language

The Ramai language is spoken across most of Rāmmuo by various groups of related tribes. The author has experienced this language through a group of people known (mostly by their neighbors) as the Erōikāma. They inhabit a forested peninsular on the northern end of a land known as Chaema.

In English, the author names the language Ramai but the native speakers give their languages various local names and depending on where in Rāmmuo one stands, one can hear it called different things. At its simplest, most of its speakers can agree that it can be called Chi Ramato which seems to translate as the language of the Ramai.

Ramai itself, the author has learned, is a historical name for the language the first speakers allegedly spoke when arriving in these lands from the north. The name is ultimately derived from the word raema, the word for a fish as these early settlers were coastal dwellers and keen fishermen. Although the Nasai speak an almost identical dialect of the language, there are some lexical differences and they refer to it by the name Chi Nasuri among themselves.

About two miles to the north-west of the Nasai lands as the crow flies, live a third group of people who call themselves the Tontinai. These people seem to be a more distantly related group although there is intermarriage between the various tribes. The author has had some interaction with these people and has determined that their dialect of the language is sufficiently different to be considered outside the realm of this grammar document; although there are many common words which are found in their dialect; and some of their native words have been borrowed into so-called standard Ramai.

The author wishes it known that although this work uses the Latin script to represent the language, the romanization used to write the language within this document is completely arbitrary and invented by the author himself as a way to represent it. Ramai is primarily a spoken language and proportionally few speakers are literate; but on those occasions when the language is put down in text, Ramai is written in a native script.

Words are made up of sequences of distinct phonological units which grammatarians have long-called consonants and vowels (which in this document are abbreviated to c and v respectively). Some consonants and vowels sound the same wherever they occur within a word, and have a single pronunciation. Others have more than one way of being pronounced, depending on the surrounding sounds. The various pronunciations of a phonological unit conditioned by its position are called its allophones.

In Dr. Albert’s original notes, he gave approximate English equivalents for the sounds of Ramai. He also created his own Romanization system to corelate the sounds of Ramai into a form which could be read by the average English-reader. His system was not consistent throughout his notebooks and the form used here is taken from the later notes. In this version of his grammar, the more modern IPA is used to transcribe the phonetics.