Foreword

The Romblomamonon language has been compiled by the Romblon community over the years 1986-2003. Many people contributed to this work. Special thanks are expressed to the more than 100 people of various municipalities throughout the island of Romblon who shared their life experiences on tape, and to Emilia Tabardilla for her recording and transcription of these tapes. The entire dictionary was compiled from these collected narratives, which were analyzed with the aid of a computer program that generated a concordance of the roots and affixes of the language within the context of sentences. During 10 years over 1 million words were collected. These represented about 250 categories within Romblomanon culture and genres.

Literature provides the opportunity for a linguistic community to record and share its knowledge and culture with the world, and also opens a window to share the wisdom and enjoyment of other cultures. The main goal of this dictionary is the provision of an important tool for the translation into Romblomanon of some of the great literature of the world.

A secondary goal of this dictionary is to provide a model for Romblomanon speakers who wish to speak and write in English. Explanations of adjectives, verbs, and most adverbs are full English sentences, giving the linguistic context in which the Romblomanon words are typically used. It also gives some indication of how English words are used.

It was considered helpful, as much as possible, to describe Romblomanon words in linguistic contexts consistant with Romblomanon grammar. Thus, idiomatic English was sacrificed at the expense of illustrating grammatical features of Romblomanon. Many more passives were used, for example, in example translations than would be normally used in English. Nevertheless, standard grammatical English was used as much as possible to translate Romblomanon sentences.