The Rohonc Codex: Hungary’s Mysterious Manuscript That No One Can Read
Image by Klaus Schmeh, via Wikimedia Commons
Magyar, which is spoken and written in Hungary, ranks among the hardest European languages to learn. (The U.S. Foreign Service Institute puts it in the second-to-highest level, accompanied by the dreaded asterisk labeling it as “usually more difficult than other languages in the same category.”) But once you master its vowel harmony system, its definite and indefinite conjugation, and its eighteen grammatical cases, among other notorious features, you can finally enjoy the work of writers like Nobel Laureates Imre Kertész and László Krasznahorkai in the original. Alas, no degree of mastery will be much help if you want to understand a much older — and, in its way, much more notorious — Hungarian text, the Rohonc Codex.
“Little is known about this book before it was bequeathed to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1838,” writes The Art Newspaper’s Garry Shaw. “Its 448 pages bear illustrations covering Biblical themes and an as yet unreadable text, written using around 150 different symbols.”
Like the famously cryptic Voynich Manuscript, much covered here on Open Culture, “there has been much speculation over what language, if any, is encoded — ranging from old Hungarian to Sanskrit, or even a specially invented one — as well as debate over the book’s origin and date of creation.” Most colorfully, some attribute it to the notorious nineteenth-century forger Sámuel Literáti Nemes.
Download this PDF scan of the Rohonc Codex, and you can behold for yourself both its often charmingly simple medieval-style illustrations — many of which exhibit a mixture of Christian, Pagan, and Muslim symbolism — and the fiendishly regular-looking script against which generations of would-be decipherers have banged their heads. Here in the twenty-twenties, perhaps artificial intelligence can do its part, as has been attempted with the Voynich Manuscript, to build upon earlier analyses. One of those, conducted in the early nineteen-seventies, determined that, whatever the language in which the Rohonc Codex was written, it shows no traces of case endings. To enthusiasts of bizarre manuscripts, that discovery probably means little, but to students of Magyar, nothing could come as a greater relief.
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An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published
Solving a 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle: How a Cambridge Student Cracked an Ancient Sanskrit Code
The Foot-Licking Demons & Other Strange Things in a 1921 Illustrated Manuscript from Iran
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.