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”. More.

See: The Guardian

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