Lexicon
Rama has borrowed words from Miskito (e.g. taara "big"), English, Rama Cay Creole and Spanish. Besides such loans, Rama has a primary lexicon of Chibchan origin, expanded through various word-formation processes, to which we now turn.
Many verb stems are made up of extensions from primary roots by the addition of one of the prefixes al- and aa-, which often correlate with intransitive and transitive meanings respectively. Evident intransitive derivation with al- is illustrated by the pairs maling "kill" : almaling "die", aark : alaark "break (tr./intr.)" and auk : alauk "roast (tr./intr.)", while other cases of outward resemblance are semantically opaque, e.g. kwis "eat" and alkwis "speak", or involve more complex relationships, e.g. aap (i.e. aa- + p) "find" and baalp (ba- + al + p "seek".
Verbs may be derived from other parts of speech by suffixing one of several verbal roots glossed as "do, make", such as -king, -ting and -uung.
A common adjective-forming suffix is -ba, while the participial suffix -ima gives rise to both adjectives and nouns.
Certain recurrent endings found in numerous noun stems appear to correspond to vague semantic classes. A notable example is -up, which occurs as the last component in nouns many of which denote round objects, fruits or body parts. As an inalienable noun in its own right, -up means "eye" or "seed".
Composition is another common way of forming nouns, as in suulikaas "meat" (from suuli "animal" + kaas "flesh") or the inalienable noun -upulis "eyelash" (from -up "eye" + ulis "hair").
New concepts can also be expressed syntactically, e.g. through genitive constructions such as preya aing nguu "church" (lit. house of prayer), or through verbal paraphrase.
Partial or complete reduplication is seen in the forms of some words, including onomatopoeics such as tahtah "dripping", animal names like ngaukngauk "spider" or tkwustkwus "rabbit", colour names and other descriptive adjectives such as nuknuknga "yellow", ngarngaringba "green", siksiknga "speckled", kingkingma "calm", and others, e.g. tiskitiski "a little".
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