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Gamil Sinki was born in Cairo, where he graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University in 1965. He emigrated to Canada in 1967, received his master’s degree from Concordia University, and established himself in Quebec as a mechanical engineer. He is now retired and spends most of his spare time reading, writing, and travelling. He is the author of Heritage: The Egyptian Culture in Spoken Language.
“This essay in [The State of the Arts in the Middle East Vol III] is dedicated to my chidren, as I invite them to continue the journey of their Egyptian heritage. Finally, I offer Heritage as my gift to the generations to come so that the Egyptian culture that I know and love lives eternally in the land of the diaspora. – Gamil Sinki
The spoken word is the bearer of culture. Common expressions in daily use by ordinary people are not only the means by which they communicate with each other, but are the essential elements of a society bound together in time and place. The continuous injection of new vocabulary and forms of expression into the everyday spoken language further enriches and at the same time alters it. With the passage of time, a new “generation” of idioms and colloquialisms displaces the old.
