raym- - excess, redundance, superiority; small mountains
(Lane 1203)
For rēm ‘Dach, Haus’ in the Arabic dialects of Yemen v. Behnstedt 481 (most probably
due to South Arabian substratum influence). The same is true of raym- ‘stairs,’ registered as a
Yemenite word in Classical lexicography (al-Selwi 1987:101)
This is the most reliable reflex of *rym in Geez. The exact philological background of
rayama ‘to be high, to be long,’ rəyyum ‘raised, elevated’ and rayyām ‘high, elevated’ remains
to be established insofar as none of them is listed in LLA
Most probably from *rayyəm, as a hypercorrect reaction to the sporadic shift z > y in Amharic (for which see Podolsky 1991:44). A further hypercorrect development is found in the verb räzzämä ‘to be high, tall, long’ (AED 404)