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Portfolio 14
Page 27
Jersey Saple
Further historical notes, linguistic in particular, for possible inclusion in history of the Rafer race. Fact, theory and lore collected by self and Billister from interviews with incarcerated red-leggers.
The Rafer language, formally known to its users as Guller, appears to be an amalgam of ancient tongues, including American Indian dialects, Spanish, a whit of English, and a large measure from a pre-war European country called Africa, more specifically its sector called Sierra Leone. They are a darker-skinned people than the predominant mainland race, which itself is undoubtedly a mixture of ancient bloodlines. The Rafers owe their isolation and proliferation, in part, to homelands remote from the ravages of Big Bang Day (islands south and east of mainland Merqua, as well as swamplands rimming the Gulf of Texaco).
The Rafer gene pool has remained to a large part distinct. This is due in part to their religious devotion to the writings of an ancient named Rutherford Cross and to his "son" Pec-Pec, as well as an aversion to systems and regulation inherent in the current mainland government.
Guller would seem to have had some effect on mainland English. Witness the ancient word Guller itself, which aside from naming the language, also is a Rafer word meaning wisdom, understanding or fluency. To be fluent in Guller would have meant, to Rafers of long past, to have education, to have wisdom. It would seem to be the derivation of the mainland word gully, which of course carries precisely the same definitions. The word gully, by the way, is not to be found in any of the prewar English writings impounded in New Chicago, or in Revolutionary archives.
Government linguists, prone to disparagement and degrandizement of the Rafers, have argued that the word derives somehow from gullible, which would require that in the course of doing so it took on a nearly opposite definition. That would make it a rare case, indeed.