August 26, 2015
No, the Lilliputians Didn’t Speak Hebrew
By PhilologosIt was widely reported this month that a professor in Texas had "decoded" the strange language spoken in Gulliver's Travels. He did no such thing.
It’s been in the Guardian. It’s been in the Daily Mail. It’s been in the Times of Israel. It’s even been in Mosaic, which picked it up from the Jerusalem Post. “Did The Lilliputians Speak Hebrew?” was the headline. Elsewhere the story has been titled “Gulliver’s Travels Decoded,” “Scientist Deciphers Mystery Words from Gulliver’s Travels,” and “UH Linguist Explains Secret Language of Gulliver’s Travels.”
The last of these captions comes from an August 10 press release issued by the University of Houston, on which, as far as I can determine, all the other stories are based. This PR item, in turn, cites an article published by Irving N. Rothman, a professor in the university’s English literature department, in the latest volume of Swift Studies, an annual review of scholarship dealing with Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), the author of Gulliver’s Travels, that is put out by the Ehrenpreis Center of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität of Münster, Germany. Since, however, I have found no way of getting hold of this volume, or of Rothman’s full-length article on “The ‘Hnea Yahoo’ of Gulliver’s Travels and Jonathan Swift’s Hebrew Neologisms,” I will have to make do with the press release.
Believe me, dear reader, that’s quite enough. It’s total rubbish.