In the world of linguistic cryptography, the Voynich Manuscript usually steals the spotlight. With its bizarre botanical drawings and elegant, indecipherable calligraphy, it has captured the imagination of the internet for decades. But deep in the archives of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences lies a smaller, grittier, and perhaps even more perplexing cousin: the Rohonc Codex.
For nearly two centuries, linguists, cryptographers, and historians have banged their heads against its worn pages. Is it a secret prayer book saved from the Inquisition? A Proto-Hungarian history lost to time? Or is it the elaborate practical joke of a brilliant 19th-century forger? For language enthusiasts, the Rohonc Codex offers a fascinating case study in writing systems, syntax, and the sheer complexity of human communication.
The Discovery: A Book from Nowhere
The story begins in 1838, when Count Gusztáv Batthyány, a Hungarian nobleman, donated his massive personal library to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Buried among thousands of volumes was a small, unassuming leather-bound book. It had no title page, no author, and no known origin. It was cataloged simply as “served from the library at Rohonc” (modern-day Rechnitz, Austria).
The physical object is relatively small—about 12 by 10 centimeters—containing 448 pages. While the paper itself feels ancient, the content is alien. The pages are filled with a script that runs right-to-left and features distinctive, angular characters that resemble no known alphabet in human history. Interspersed among the text are 87 crude illustrations depicting religious scenes, laypeople, and warfare, mixing Christian iconography with strange, pagan-like symbols (like suns and moons having faces).
The Linguistic Nightmare: Alphabet, Syllabary, or Logogram?
From a linguistic perspective, the Rohonc Codex is a statistician’s nightmare. To understand why it is so difficult to crack, we have to look at the number of symbols used.
Most alphabetic languages are economical. English uses 26 letters; the Cyrillic alphabet uses 33; the Greek alphabet uses 24. Even if you include punctuation and capitalization, the number of distinct “glyphs” remains low. Syllabaries, like Japanese Hiragana or Katakana, usually cap out at around 50 to 100 characters.
The Rohonc Codex, however, utilizes nearly 800 distinct characters (some estimates cite 792). This massive inventory of signs presents a massive classification problem:
- It is too large to be an alphabet: You don’t need 792 letters to construct phonemes.
- It is too large to be a standard syllabary: Most spoken languages don’t possess that many unique syllable combinations.
- It is too small to be a pure logographic system: Chinese, for example, requires thousands of characters to be functional. A lexicon of only 800 words would be extremely limiting for a book of this length unless the text is highly repetitive.
This places the Codex in a “linguistic uncanny valley.” It suggests that the script might be a syllabary with logographic elements (like Mayan hieroglyphs) or, more likely, a sophisticated stenography (shorthand) or cipher system where single characters represent common words or concepts like “God”, “King”, or “Land.”
The Hoax Theory: The Mischief of Sámuel Literáti Nemes
Whenever a historical mystery surfaces in 19th-century Hungary, the name Sámuel Literáti Nemes usually follows. Nemes was a Transylvanian-Hungarian antiquarian and infamous forger. During this era, Hungary was undergoing a massive national awakening. There was a desperate cultural desire to prove that the Hungarian language and people had ancient, noble roots distinct from the Austrian Habsburgs.
Nemes was known for “discovering” artifacts that conveniently proved Hungarian historical continuity. Skeptics argue that Nemes created the Codex to fool the Academy. The arguments for the hoax theory are compelling:
- The Paper: The paper contains a watermark of an anchor in a circle, characteristic of Venetian paper produced in the 1530s. However, forgers often buy old blank books to write new fake histories.
- The Illustrations: Art historians have noted that the clothing depicted in the illustrations doesn’t match the 16th century (when the paper was made) but looks more like an amateur attempting to draw “old-timey” clothes in the 18th or 19th century.
- The Gibberish Factor: For a long time, the text resisted all statistical scrutiny, leading many to believe it was “asemic writing”—doodles that look like writing but have no semantic meaning.
If Nemes wrote it, he committed to the bit. Writing 448 pages of consistent, repeating, complex symbols right-to-left is an arduous task for a mere prank.
Recent Breakthroughs: Breaking the Code
For decades, the “Hoax Theory” was the consensus. However, in the 21st century, the pendulum began to swing. Computer-assisted analysis suggests the text exhibits Zipf’s Law—a statistical pattern found in all natural human languages regarding the frequency distribution of words.
In 2018, a major breakthrough was proposed by two Hungarian researchers, Gábor Tokai and Levente Zoltán Király. Unlike previous researchers who tried to map the symbols to ancient alphabets (like Old Hungarian runes or Sumerian), they treated the Codex as a code system.
They hypothesized that the Codex is not a unique language, but a hidden script for an existing one. By analyzing the illustrations, they found references to specific biblical passages. For example, an image of the Holy Family fleeing to Egypt was accompanied by a specific block of text.
Using this “crib” (a known piece of plaintext used to break a cipher), they began to construct a grammar. Their findings suggest:
- The Language is Artificial: It is likely a system of stenography (shorthand) used by Catholic clergy.
- The Underlying Language: The grammar and sentence structure appear to be Latin or a Romance language mixed with Hungarian logic.
- The Content: It is a collection of prayers, homilies, and biblical paraphrases.
Tokai and Király identified characters for “Jesus”, “Pilate”, and “God.” They argue that the 10x character count that baffled linguists was actually a feature of the shorthand—combining letters and common suffixes into single, complex symbols to save space and time.
Why Is It Written in Code?
If the Tokai-Király hypothesis holds true, the question shifts from “What language is this?” to “Why hide it?”
The Venetian paper dates to the 1530s—the height of the Reformation and the wars with the Ottoman Empire. This was a dangerous time to be a religious scholar in Central Europe. Cryptic shorthand was not uncommon for clerics who wanted to protect their personal musings or unapproved translations of scripture from accusations of heresy.
Alternatively, it may not have been about secrecy at all. Just as modern students create their own abbreviations for note-taking, a monk or scholar may have developed a personal “conlang” (constructed language) simply for the efficiency of writing.
Hoax or History?
So, is the Rohonc Codex a genuine piece of history or a linguistic fraud?
The evidence is mounting that the text has meaning. It possesses internal consistency, grammatical structure, and context-sensitive vocabulary. If it is a hoax, it is a hoax of Tolkien-esque proportions—a fully realized artificial language created solely to deceive.
However, if it is genuine, it represents a remarkable survival: a unique, personal writing system from a turbulent era of European history. For the language learner and the linguist, the Rohonc Codex serves as a reminder that language is not just a tool for communication—it is a code. Whether that code is shared by millions or known only to one lonely scholar in a candlelit room, the human drive to record our thoughts is undeniable.
Until a complete translation is verified, the Rohonc Codex remains a tantalizing puzzle, sitting quietly on a shelf in Budapest, daring us to read it.