Professor of English at the University of Houston says his research points to satire’s use of words derived from Jewish language

Isaac Asimov might have dismissed the invented languages in Gulliver’s Travels as “made up nonsense” but a professor at the University of Houston believes he has cracked a code dreamed up by Jonathan Swift almost 300 years ago, arguing that the “nonsense” words are actually Hebrew.

Swift’s satire, first published in 1726, sees Gulliver travel to several “remote regions of the world”, including Lilliput, where he finds himself tied to the ground by six-inch-high human figures, where he meets a man “as tall as an ordinary spire steeple”, and the country of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos, respectively talking horses, and filthy, human-like beings.

Gulliver has no problems learning the various languages. In Lilliput, although at first “I spoke to them in as many languages as I had the least smattering of, which were High and Low Dutch, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and Lingua Franca, but all to no purpose”, subsequently the emperor orders that “six of his majesty’s greatest scholars should be employed to instruct me in their language”, while in the country of the Houyhnhnms, he says that “in five months from my arrival I understood whatever was spoken, and could express myself tolerably well”.

But various declarations from the different races – “Hekinah degul”, the Lilliputians shout when they have Gulliver tied up; and “Borach mevolah” after he drains two hogsheads of wine – have puzzled scholars for centuries. “Some people have tried to make sense out of the words and phrases introduced by Swift but, in general, this is a waste of time,” wrote Asimov in an introduction to the novel in 1980. “I suspect that Swift simply made up nonsense for the purpose.”

But in a paper published in Swift Studies, Irving Rothman, a professor of English literature at the University of Houston, expounds his theory that Swift used Hebrew words throughout the novel.

“Degul”, writes Rothman, is the Hebrew word for “flag”, and the verb “hikinah” in Hebrew means “to transfer, impart, or give”. “Thus,” writes Rothman, “one might deduce that Hekinah Degul pronounces a militant stance, offers a display of colours, and urges Gulliver’s capitulation to the Lilliputian flag.”

He also suggests that adding an “s” to “hekinah” gives the Hebrew word for “God or inspiration”. “The Lilliputians may have thought that they were in the presence of a miraculous being, Gulliver, and sought to claim him for their own.”

As for the Lilliputians’ cry of “Borach mevolah” after Gulliver’s drinking prowess, meanwhile, Rothman says that “baruch” is the Hebrew word for “blessed” and “mivolah”, spelled in Hebrew “mivolim”, means “complete defeat”, arguing that “Gulliver’s drinking all that liquor leaves him helpless and in a drunken state”.

Rothman agrees with earlier interpretations that the word “yahoo”, which describes the bestial creatures of the fourth book in the novel, is derived from the four-letter holy Hebrew name of God, YHWH, pronounced “Yahweh”. But he goes one step further to analyse why Swift might have used the name of God to describe the “unquestionably evil beings” with “the biblical name of God”.

The Yahoos, he argues, are described as “hnea Yahoo”, and if the word “hnea” is read from right to left, like Hebrew, the word becomes “ayn”, meaning “not”.

“Critics have recognised the venal and sinful nature of the Yahoos, but none have noted the fact that the name Hnea Yahoo could represent the Yahoo as the antithesis of the godhead,” he writes.

The academic, who has taught Restoration and 18th-Century English literature at the University of Houston since 1967, as well as a newer course in Jewish-American literature as a member of the Jewish Studies faculty, said he first realised that Swift might be using Hebrew when he observed that the alphabet in the land of the giants, the Brobdingnags, has 22 letters; “No law in that country must exceed in words the number of letters in their alphabet, which consists only of two and twenty,” writes Swift. The Hebrew alphabet also has 22 letters, Rothman points out, and Swift had studied Hebrew at Trinity College, as an Anglican minister.