The bible is written in classical Hebrew (there are many other types and older types)
YHWH is a classical Hebrew sentence that roughly means 'he wills it, and it happens'. The Hebrew language has such mechanisms for saying things in a shortened form, much like today CPR, RSVP, VIP etc....
Adonai is also Classical Hebrew, but its a word.... It means 'LORD' and 'MASTER'.
The bible only uses these two terms when referring to god in the HEBREW scriptures. Later texts had adonai replace YHWH as jews felt the YHWH sentence was to be saved for initimate prayer etc. When I say replace, they were written below the word, to be read instead of it, unless you were praying to god.
700 years after Jesus a Christian monk decided this was a code. He decided that these two terms could be the name for god if he mixed them together. He mixed together the sentence YHWH with the missing vowels from Adonai, which made YaHoWaH. This got very popular, christians knew gods name and nobody else did. When it spread it got latinised to JaHoVaH. Now in bibles, YHWH was replaced with Jahovah, with LORD written beath it.
CENTURIES PASSED....
Bible scholars the world over, all knowing the name Jehovah, singing his name in hymns etc ... eventually came across the ancient manuscripts, in caves, in pottery under the ground, in religious structures.... And they realised the story behind the name. They saw it for the folly that it was and replaced every embarassing reminder of how uninspired their bible must be i.e. the very wrong word Jahovah and replaced it with....LORD.
OK..... Now come along the Bible students..... Looking to be a bit different. They read the small print in their King James Bible....what's this? GODS NAME IS JEHOVAH...... The scholars all shouted .."no wait you don't...." But it was too late, they named themselves after it.
Then in the 70's the JW's under the cover of darkness slip a sentence into their Greek interlinear bible... in the middle of the opening pages they openly state that nobody knows the true pronunciation of YHWH (true because there were no vowels but this is a different issue to the use of the word Jehovah) but that they decided on the use of the word Jehovah because ........ It was popularly known.
that my friend is what the name Jehovah means...... Nothing.
The society went one more evil step further... What language is YHWH and Adonai? Hebrew.... They were never mixed together in ancient Hebrew, it was an idea of a monastery nearly 2000years after it was written in approx 700ad. Yet in the Watchtowers GREEK scriptures, everytime the name lord appeared they swapped it with..... JEHOVAH despite there being not one YHWH (Hebrew) in the entire Greek text, including in their very own Greek interlinear!
shameful?.....
"Legitimate scholars in the Biblical languages and manuscripts don’t think much of the NWT. Dr. Bruce Metzger is a well-known scholar whose works are seminary standards. He used the following adjectives when describing the NWT: “a frightful mistranslation,” “erroneous,” “pernicious,” and “reprehensible.”[3] British Bible scholar H.H. Rowley stated that the NWT is “a shining example of how the Bible should not be translated.”[4] He also referred to the NWT as “an insult to the Word of God.”[5] While this list could go on, let me conclude with the words of Dr. William Barclay who stated, “It is abundantly clear that a sect which can translate the New Testament like that is intellectually dishonest.”[6] "
3. Bruce Metzger; cited in Ron Rhodes, Reasoning from the Scriptures with the Jehovah’s Witnesses (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1993), p. 97.
4. H.H. Rowley, “How Not to Translate the Bible,” The Expository Times, No. 1953, pp.41-42.
5, Ibid
6. William Barclay; cited in Rhodes, p. 97.