Loss of case inflection in a Paleo-Arabic inscription

 The Twitter user @mashalgrad published a newly documented Paleo-Arabic text from the region of Nagrān:

Source

Reading: حمدو بر ابو مراه

Interpretation: Ḥāmid-w son of Abū Mrʾh

Commentary: The name ḥāmid is well attested in the Arabic onomasticon; it is attested for the first time in the Paleo-Arabic corpus here with wawation. Mrʾh, however, is rare, but is attested as a male anthroponym over 30 times in the Safaitic corpus as mrʾt. In terms of orthography, it is notable that the glottal stop is spelled with the alif, indicating that the phoneme was preserved, in contrast to its loss in Old Ḥigāzī. The spelling of the glottal stop with alif has been previously attested in the Paleo-Arabic inscriptions of Ḥimà. 

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The short text is impossible to date in precise terms. Paleographically, it fits between the late 5th and early 7th centuries CE. What it does demonstrate, however, is that the local dialect of Arabic in this period seems to have lost case inflection, as the word ʾabū should be inflected in the genitive as ʾabī <ʾby>. The loss of inflection in the word ʾbw has been previously observed in Nabataeo-Arabic from Northwest Arabia.

dkyr bpnw br

ʾbw ypny 

'May Bpnw son of Abū Ypny be remembered' (Reading: Laïla Nehmé)

There is one caveat in the case of UJadhNab 222: the author may have been writing in Aramaic, as suggested by the use of the participle dkyr, and therefore did not inflect Arabic names in an Aramaic linguistic context, similar to how English speakers do not inflect Latin loanwords for case when writing in English. However, in the current Paleo-Arabic text, there is no reason to assume that our author was composing an Aramaic inscription; the use of the Aramaeogram <br> for 'son' continues well into the Islamic period and does not imply any sort of code switching. Thus, the inscription strongly suggests that the local dialect of Arabic had lost case inflection, in contrast to Old Ḥigāzī, as attested in the Quranic Consonantal Text, which preserves the inflection of the "five nouns." This, in turn, demonstrates that  case inflection had begun to disappear in pre-Islamic Peninsular Arabic dialects as well, and not only in the Arabic of northwest Arabia (see the Petra Papryi: https://www.academia.edu/37215697/Al_Jallad_2018_The_Arabic_of_Petra), foreshadowing the linguistic situation attested in the Arabic of the Islamic conquests, as described here: https://www.academia.edu/24938389/Al_Jallad_2017_The_Arabic_of_the_Islamic_Conquests_Notes_on_Phonology_and_Morphology_based_on_the_Greek_Transcriptions_from_the_First_Islamic_Century.