"Garr's classic study on dialect geography of the Levant was the first book-length attempt to follow in the steps of Zellig Harris, The Development of the Canaanite Dialects in 45 years. This Eisenbrauns' reprint makes the book (out of print for several years) available once again to students of the Canaanite languages.



The book opens with an introduction that gives the methodology used, a survey of past studies, the corpus of texts used in the study, and Garr's goals. The next three chapters provide a comprehensive list of phonological, morphological, and syntactical features, which are then gathered into a comprehensive table and analyzed for their relevance to dialectical classification. Conclusions and a rich bibliography follow, as well as indexes of subject, texts cited, and words. "