I am surprised by the last comment on this ticket as it shows a clear misunderstanding of what's being asked for. The reporter isn't asking for Hibernate to do the work of identifying keywords for him, but rather asking HQL to implement a standard escape sequence that the developer can use as they see fit to escape columns which might be reserved words. Hibernate would obviously replace the escape characters if necessary with the appropriate escape sequence for the DBMS in use prior to executing the query.

Suggested HQL

SELECT [select], [from], [where]
FROM [drop]
WHERE [inner] = ?
  AND [join] = ?

Adding escape characters to the mapping files isn't even an option for those of us using Hibernate inside an application server that auto-generates the mappings on the fly such as ColdFusion's inbuilt ORM.