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While Nöldeke’s student Siegmund Fraenkel had previously studied Aramaic loanwords in literary Arabic and Joseph Hubeika had studied some aspects of the Aramaic substratum in Syrian and Lebanese dialects of Arabic, the present work by Michel Feghali, his doctoral dissertation, is the first larger scale investigation of Syriac loans in Arabic dialects, in this case, those of Lebanon. In these dialects are many words and expressions that do not occur in classical Arabic, and so there is an abundance of new material to work through from the point of view of contact linguistics. Feghali categorizes these “loans” more accurately as “survivals”. His prefatory material covers relevant geographical and historical information relating to Lebanon, its linguistic history, different dialects of Syriac and its disappearance from Lebanon, etc. In the main part of the book he covers phonological, morphological, and syntactical differences and similarities between Syriac and Lebanese Arabic dialects. The book concludes with an appendix listing words in these dialects of Syriac origin from the spheres of religion, the home, and agriculture. This book will be of definite interest to scholars of Syriac and Arabic, but also to linguists in general, especially those who work on language contact.

The book concludes with an appendix listing words in the dialects of Syriac and Lebanese Arabic origin from the spheres of religion, the home, and agriculture.

doi:10.7282/T3M0474W

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