This is from research I did for the Da Vinci Code religion - it's about how we have altered the name of God and Jesus over the years.
In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown says that YHWH in the Bible stands for "Jehovah" which comes from Jah for male and Havah for female. As this four letter word is a core part of many religious beliefs, this would be an important issue to get correct.
First, a note on the Hebrew language. There were originally 22 letters in Hebrew - 18 consonants and 4 vowel/consonants (like our modern day "Y"). The four special letters were aleph א, hey ה, vav ו, and yud י. Usually writings used no vowels, because people just knew what they would be. Sort of like writing "fr scr nd svn yrs g" instead of "four score and seven years ago". It's a shorthand that the Hebrews simply learned and understood.
So in the Hebrew language, the word for God's name was written as YHWH - יהוה. Interestingly this only involves "consonant/vowel" special letters. Note that the word FOR God in Hebrew is "elohiym". Legend has it that Moses was actually told the full name of God (with the vowels), wrote this down as proper Hebrew syntax for a word (leaving out those vowels), and that it was decided that nobody going forward should actually speak God's name. So when people saw YHWH in their Bible, they would say the word "Lord" in whatever language they were speaking. That four letter combination YHWH is called the "tetragrammaton". YHWH was said to have been chosen (by God) because it was similar to "HYH" which means "to become". This was combined with "HWH' meaning "he is".
Jehovah is a RECENT word from the 1534 by Martin Luther as the "speakable" version of YHWH
Translators hit the Jewish combination YHWH and weren't sure what it translated as. So they stuck in the vowels from the Hebrew word for Lord (adonai). Combining IHVH (another form of YHWH) with AOAI creates IAHOVAHI and the IA becomes IE out of tradition. So we've got IEHOVAHI.
The first version of the Bible in English was done by Tyndale in 1525, and God's name was shown as IEHOUAH. Other Bibles of the time put the words "THE LORD" in small capitals in this spot, to point out to people that the name should not be spoken. Those who understood the tradition of "not saying God's real name" kept saying Lord when they hit the word "Iehouah", as they should have. Remember, before this point, there were no real printing presses so only the most educated of people would have their own hand-done Bible. These people knew well how to say or not say certain words, from their training. But the many people who now got a Bible without that background information would say Jehovah when they saw it printed in their Bible.
Interestingly, Jehovah's Witnesses claim that the name was *always* pronounced as Jehovah and that the above sequence of events was guided by God so we would pronounce it this way now.
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Just to go off on a further tangent, as I tend to do, Jesus's full original name in Hebrew was Yehoshuah. This was Yeshua for short. The New Testament was written in Greek (not Hebrew) so they made that Iesu. The Greek language doesn't have any Y or "SH" letters, like Hebrew does. Also, Greeks add the letter S to the end of names so the name was now Iesus. Now when we get to Europe, the Europeans were translating this name, the Germans used a J because the J was pronounced as an I (sort of like in English how we use C and K in various words). So the name was written Jesus but was pronounced "Iesus" (like "yaesoos"). Then this was brought into English and the translators didn't know about the I/J issue and left the J, but the English people now pronounced it "Jesus" as in "geezus". So we are FAR from pronouncing Jesus' name the way it should be. If Jesus came back to earth and said "I am Yeshua" nobody would understand what he meant. It's pretty sad, really.
