Words in 'Gulliver's Travels' such as "Borach Mivola" - believed to be "nonsense" that author Jonathan Swift made up - may actually be variations of Hebrew, according to a US linguist who may have solved a 289-year-old puzzle.
Irving N Rothman, a professor of English literature and Jewish studies at the University of Houston said the mystery words in 'Gulliver's Travels' are variations of Hebrew.
Rothman points out a number of clues he used to reach this conclusion. Swift, he noted, was an Anglican minister who studied Hebrew at Trinity College.
'Gulliver's Travels,' published in 1726, is Swift's best-known work, a satire on human nature, politics and the traveler's tales popular at the time.
Written in the voice of traveler Lemuel Gulliver, the novel reports the unlucky Gulliver's various adventures, including his capture on the shores of the island nation of Lilliput by a race of people just six inches tall.
Immediately upon his capture, Gulliver encounters a puzzling use of language.
"When Gulliver awakens to discover himself tethered to the ground, he finds himself face to face with a six-inch Lilliputian who utters the words 'Hekinah Degul,'" Rothman said.
"The words are repeated when the Lilliputians observe Gulliver drinking two hogsheads of a liquor resembling Burgundy. When he swallows the people shout 'Borach Mivola'," he said.
In his 1980 annotated version of the book, Isaac Asimov wrote that "making sense out of the words and phrases introduced by Swift...Is a waste of time...I suspect that Swift simply made up nonsense for the purpose."
Rothman disagrees and offers a lengthy list of examples as evidence of Swift's use of Hebrew.
He said that readers are told the alphabet in the land of the giants - the Brobdingnags - consists of 22 letters. Hebrew relies upon a 22-letter alphabet, compared to the 26 letters of the English alphabet.
Rothman said the phrase Borach Mivola, shouted as Gulliver drinks the liquor, can be interpreted with Borach as a variant of the Hebrew Boruch, or blessed. Mivola, if spelled in the Hebrew manner mivolim, means "complete defeat," he said.
Rothman said the strongest evidence of Swift's use of Hebrew terminology is the book's use of the word "yahoo" which is used to describe the creatures Gulliver encounters in Book IV, a human-like species described as wild and irrational.
He noted earlier interpretations suggesting the word comes from the four-letter holy Hebrew name of god, written YHWH and pronounced Yahweh. Similar interpretations point to another four-letter name, YHVH, or Yahveh.
According to Rothman, the Yahoos are described as Hnea Yahoo, and he said the word Hnea, if read right-to-left as Hebrew is read, is the word ayn, or not.
"Those beasts are the opposite of God and the antithesis of God," he said.
