In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver encounters various creatures speaking fictional languages long thought to be mere gibberish. Irving Rothman, a scholar of English literature, now contends that Swift, who learned Hebrew while a university student, employed variations of that language to create his invented tongues. Hayah Goldlist-Eichler writes:
One piece of evidence is straightforward: the alphabet in the land of giants—the Brobdingnags—consists of 22 letters, as does the Hebrew alphabet. . . .
[But] Rothman says his strongest evidence is his interpretation of the book’s use of “Yahoo,” [the name of] a human-like species described as wild and irrational. “[The Yahoos] represent . . . the bestial element in man—the unenlightened, unregenerate, irrational element in human nature,” according to Rothman.
He noted earlier interpretations suggesting the word comes from the four-letter holy Hebrew name of god, written YHWH and pronounced Yahweh. . . According to Rothman, [however,] the Yahoos . . . are referred to as “Hnea Yahoo,” and the word Hnea, if read right-to-left, as Hebrew is read, is the word “eyn“—the Hebrew word for “not.”
“Those beasts are the opposite of God and the antithesis of God,” explained Rothman.
Read more on Jerusalem Post: http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Culture/The-Lilliputians-in-Swifts-Gullivers-Travels-may-have-been-speaking-Hebrew-411914