Studies in the Mehri Dialect: A New Work by Ibn Fail.

Arabian Sea - Exclusive

Al-Ghaydah/Special I dedicate with the ink of my heart to the professor of language and grammar at the University of Sharqiyah in the Sultanate of Oman, Dr. Amer Fail Balhaf, his latest publication entitled "Studies in the Mehri Language." Dr. Amer Fail To his beloved son Abdullah... after an incident that broke the heart... and left an indelible scar. The book, which was published this year by the Omani Society for Writers and Literati, is divided into four chapters spread over 229 pages. The first chapter is entitled "Remnants of Ancient Semitic Linguistics in the Mehri Language," in which he gathered what was written about it through three sibilant sounds that make up the group of Seen, Sheen, and a third between them... which, as the researcher "Brockelmann" mentions, exists in the mother Semitic language. In the second chapter, entitled "Masculine and Feminine Between Arabic and Mehri," the researcher Balhaf sought to study the phenomenon of feminine and masculine between Arabic and Mehri in a comparative interlinguistic study, through his observation of the rules of classical Arabic and comparing them with contemporary Mehri usage. The author faced a scarcity of sources, so he resorted to collecting material from the mouths of Mehri speakers, which Amer is fluent in, as it is his mother tongue, just as he is fluent in Arabic and English. In the third chapter, the researcher expresses his fear about the danger of the extinction of the Mehri, Soqotri, and other languages that we may no longer hear, such as "Harsusi, Bathari, and Hobiut," and he joins his voice to the voices of orientalists to preserve and protect them before they disappear. In this chapter, he tried to answer these fears and others by trying to clarify the reality of human languages in general, and to know the concept of extinction, its signs, and its stages, as well as to trace the stages of attempts to save and preserve them globally. He concluded his book with a fourth chapter in which he strove to define the modern scientific approach to the Mehri language, taking the efforts of the Mehri Language Center for Studies and Research in our country as a field for monitoring... and he came out with results that Fail attributed to the center, including the "Mehri Linguistic Corpus" project, in addition to developing the "Comprehensive Mehri Dictionary" to protect the Mehri language from extinction, and developing a writing system for the Mehri language, after it had remained for thousands of years a spoken language only. It is worth mentioning that the Mehri language is considered one of the ancient South Arabian languages to this day, and as "Brockelmann" considers it to be "ancient linguistic remnants, along with Shahri and Soqotri." While Dr. Amer sees the Mehri language and its sister languages as languages in which various linguistic elements from the north and south have intertwined, pointing out that they contain models of the ancient Semitic language. The book is an added value to local, Arab, and international libraries... and is worth reading.