Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 13, 2015

Did the Lilliputians Speak Hebrew?

A scholar of Jonathan Swift thinks so.

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:

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