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From: atlloyd@acer.gen.tcd.ie (Andrew Lloyd)
Subject: Gulliver's Travels
Message-ID: <atlloyd-200695104839@gen035.gen.tcd.ie>
Followup-To: sci.lang
Sender: usenet@news.tcd.ie (TCD News System )
Organization: Genetics Dept. Trinity College, Dublin 2. Ireland.
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 1995 10:48:39 GMT
Lines: 49

I have just finished reading Gulliver's Travels (no colour
pictures in this Penguin Out Of Copyright Classic - OOCC -
edition).  Should I spend any time trying to make sense of
Swift's forays into foreign language?   Such phrases in
Lilliputan as  Hekinah degul, Tolgo phonac, Borach mivola,
Langro dehul san, Peplom selan and Quinbus flestrin: do they
mean anything or are they just Swiftian gibberish.  If the
book had been written by JRR Tolkein I cd be confident that
each word had been meticulously researched and derived from
Old High Magyar, but with Swift ... ?

In the section on Laputa the flying island, he essays whole
sentences in Laputan:
Ickpling gloffthrobb squutseruum blhiop mlashnalt zwin 
tnodbalkguffh slhiophad

(wch being translated is: may your celestial majesty outlive
the sun eleven moons and a half)

Fluft drin yalerick dwuldom prastrad mirpush

(my tongue is in the mouth of my friend - yum!)

Given that transliteration conventions have evolved (Swift 
calls a well known Japanese port Nangasac for example) do
these sentences bear any relation to any known language?

Another line which I am loath to pursue is that they mean
something in an anagrammatical code of which  he gives an 
example else where:

"Our brother Tom has just got the piles"  can be recognised
by the cognoscenti as "Resist.  A plot is brought home: The tour".
This sort of code was common enough in times past (I believe
that Galileo sent little anagrams as "priority notes" to rival
astronomers which when decoded said, in latin, something like
"The father of the gods has four visible children".  Is there
some similar timeless message in the above sentences?

I feel sure that "scholards", having had some 250 years to work
on it, have abstrated all available meaning from Gulliver.  Cd
someone point me to the right tome?

Thanks,
Andrew
atlloyd@acer.gen.tcd.ie

PS. I have other questions about the political, satirical, social
meaning of the book posted to rec.arts.books
