Adonaist
A sect holding that Jehovah's vowel points are from Adonai.
An Adonaist is a sect or party who maintain that the vowel points attached to the consonants of the word "Jehovah" are not the natural points of that word and do not represent its true pronunciation. They hold that these points actually belong to the words Adonai and Elohim, applied to the ineffable name Jehovah, which Jews were forbidden to utter, and whose true pronunciation was lost. Adonaists assert that Jews were always to pronounce the word Adonai instead of Jehovah.
Adonai
In Hebrew, God is called Adonai, meaning "Lord." Though the word is grammatically plural—"my Lords"—this is understood as a respectful form, not a literal plural. Its singular counterpart is Adoni ("my lord"), which the Phoenicians used for the god Tammuz and which gave rise to the Greek name Adonis. Jews reserve the singular Adoni for addressing a distinguished human, while the plural "rabotai" ("my masters") appears in both Mishnaic and modern Hebrew.
Out of reverence, Jews avoid pronouncing the divine name YHWH, using Adonai in prayer and Hashem ("the Name") in everyday speech. Around the eighth century CE, the Masoretes added vowel marks to the Hebrew Bible, inserting the vowels of Adonai into YHWH to remind readers to say Adonai. Later biblical scholars sometimes mistook this substitution for the actual spelling, leading to the form "Jehovah." The Sephardi translators of the Ferrara Bible went further, replacing Adonai with simply the letter A.
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