Rohonc Codex

Attila Nyíri of Hungary proposed a solution in 1996 after studying two pages of the codex.[14] He turned the pages upside down, identified a Sumerian ligature, and then associated Latin letters to the rest of the symbols by resemblance. However, he sometimes transliterated the same symbol with different letters, and conversely, the same letter was decoded from several symbols. Even then he had to rearrange the order of the letters to produce meaningful words.

The text, if taken as meaningful, is of religious, perhaps liturgical character. Its beginning, according to Nyíri, reads: Eljött az Istened. Száll az Úr. Ó. Vannak a szent angyalok. Azok. Ó. – "Your God has come. The Lord flies. Oh. There are the holy angels. Them. Oh."

Nyíri's proposition was immediately criticised by Ottó Gyürk, pointing to the fact that with such a permissive deciphering method one can get anything out of the code.[15] Also, the mere fact that Nyíri makes an uncritical allusion to the fringe theory that the Hungarian language descended from Sumerian, discredits his enterprise.

The cover of V. Enăchiuc's book

A proposed translation was published in 2002 by Romanian philologist Viorica Enăchiuc.[16] She claims that the text is written in the Vulgar Latin dialect of Dacia, and the direction of writing is right-to-left, bottom-to-top. The alleged translation indicates that the text is an 11-12th century (CE) history of the Blaki (Vlachs) people in their fights against Hungarians and Pechenegs. Toponyms and hydronyms appear as Arad, Dridu, Olbia, Ineu, Rarău, Dniester and Tisa. Diplomatic contacts between Vlad and Alexis Comnenus, Constantine Dukas and Robert of Flanders are also mentioned.

Quotations from Enăchiuc's translation:

Solrgco zicjra naprzi olto co sesvil cas – "O Sun of the live let write what span the time"[17]

Deteti lis vivit neglivlu iti iti itia niteren titius suonares imi urast ucen – "In great numbers, in the fierce battle, without fear go, go as a hero. Break ahead with great noise, to sweep away and defeat the Hungarian!"[18]

On the one hand, Enăchiuc's proposition can be criticized for the method of transliteration. Symbols that characteristically appear in the same context throughout the codex are regularly transliterated with different letters, so that the patterns in the original code are lost in the transliteration. On the other hand, Enăchiuc is criticized as a linguist and historian. She provided the only linguistic source of a hitherto unknown state of the Romanian language, and her text (even with her glossary) raises such serious doubts both in its linguistic and historic authenticity that they render her work unscientific.[19] There is no relation between the illustrations of the manuscript (of clear Christian content) and Enăchiuc's translation.

Another alleged solution was made in 2004 by the Indian Mahesh Kumar Singh.[20] He claims that the codex is written left-to-right, top-to-bottom with a so far undocumented variant of the Brahmi script. He transliterated the first 24 pages of the codex to get a Hindi text which was translated to Hungarian. His solution is mostly like the beginning of an apocryphal gospel (previously unknown), with a meditative prologue, then going on to the infancy narrative of Jesus.

According to Mahesh Kumar Singh, the upper two rows of page 1 read: he bhagwan log bahoot garib yahan bimar aur bhookhe hai / inko itni sakti aur himmat do taki ye apne karmo ko pura kar sake[21] – "Oh, my God! Here the people is very poor, ill and starving, therefore give them sufficient potency and power that they may satisfy their needs."

Singh's attempt was immediately criticized in the next issue of the same journal.[22] His transliteration lacks consistency, and is dismissed by many.[23]

Marius-Adrian Oancea considers that the codex focuses on New Testament-related topics; according to him, the language of the codex is Hungarian and the words are encoded in a version of the Old Hungarian alphabet, also known as székely rovásírás or székely-magyar rovás.[24]

Strictly methodical (and successful) investigation of the symbols was first done in 1970 by Ottó Gyürk, who examined repeated sequences to find the direction of writing (he argues for RLTB (Right to Left, Top to Bottom), with pages also ordered right-to-left), and identified numbers in the text.[25] His later remarks suggest that he also has many unpublished conjectures, based on a large amount of statistical data.[15]

Miklós Locsmándi did some computer-based research on the text in the mid-1990s. He confirmed the published findings of Gyürk, adding several others. Although with no strong arguments, he claimed the symbol "i" to be a sentence delimiter (but also the symbol of 11 (eleven), and possibly also a place value delimiter in numbers). He studied the diacritics of the symbols (mostly dots), but found no peculiar system in their usage. As he could see no traces of case endings (which are typically characteristic to the Hungarian language), he assumed that the text was probably in a language different from Hungarian. He could not prove that the codex is not a hoax; however, seeing the regularities of the text, he rejected that it be pure gibberish.[26]

After 2000, research around the codex has become more intense. Benedek Láng summarized the previous attempts and the possible research directions in a 2010 article[27] and in a 2011 book sized monograph.[28] He argued that the codex is not a hoax (as opposed to mainstream Hungarian academic opinion), but instead is a consciously encoded or enciphered text. It may be (1) a cipher, (2) a shorthand system, or (3) an artificial language. Láng assessed these possibilities systematically in his publications with the help of historical analogies.

In 2010 Gábor Tokai published a series of three short articles in the Hungarian popular science weekly, Élet és Tudomány. Tokai tries to date the codex by finding historical analogies of the imagery of the drawings. Although he brings up numerous valuable observations, his conclusions are somewhat vague. Nevertheless, his research was the first of its kind. Tokai could not rule out the possibility of a hoax, but he (like Locsmándi) insisted that whatever be the case, the text has regularities that strongly suggest a meaning.[29] Several months later Tokai also published two similarly short articles in which he started to give meaning to specific code chunks. He based his arguments mainly on character strings that appear in pictures (such as the INRI inscription on the cross). He claimed to have identified the codes of the four evangelists in biblical references, built up of an evangelist's name and a number, possibly some kind of chapter number. Based on Gyürk's and Locsmándi's work he also showed that many of the four digit numbers in the text are year numbers, using presumably a peculiar Anno Mundi epoch.[30]

Simultaneous with, and independently from Tokai, Levente Zoltán Király made significant progress in describing some structural elements of the code. In 2011 he demonstrated a method for cutting down the text into sentences with a good probability. He identified a 7 page section split by numbered headings, with the whole section preceded by its table of contents. Like Tokai, Király also discovered the codes of the four evangelists, and in addition he provided a persuasive argument for a "chapter heading system" in the codex that contains biblical references. He also dealt with the overall structure of the codex, showing that the chapter structure is not present in the first fourth of the book, partly because that part contains the long, continuous narration of the passion of Jesus Christ.[31]

According to Tokai and Király, the script is a code system that does not indicate the inner structure of words, and the language of the text is most probably artificial, as optionally proposed by Benedek Láng. They claim that the codex contains the date 1593 CE as a probable reference to its writing. They also state that by character it is an ordinary Catholic reader or breviary of the time, mostly containing paraphrases of New Testament texts (primarily from the Gospels), but also some non-Biblical material, like e.g. Seth returning to the gate of Paradise, or prayers to the Virgin Mary.

In 2018, Tokai and Király reported further progress in their work.[32]

In chronological order