Sources and credit

This page states where every file came from. It credits the work of others. It also states what may be done with each source.

The manuscript is out of copyright. Király and Tokai's dictionary, transcription and page images are theirs. The readings, tests, English and editorial matter are this project's own.

What is cited

• Levente Zoltán Király and Gábor Tokai, "Cracking the code of the Rohonc Codex", Cryptologia 42:4 (2018), 285-315.
  The dictionary and the grammar are from Király and Tokai's 2018 paper.
• Levente Zoltán Király, "A Rohonci kódex teológiai karaktere", in Hagyomány, Identitás, Történelem 2022, KRE HTK, Budapest 2023, 363-376.
  The explanation of why their site exists is from Király's 2022 paper.
• Ottó Gyürk (1970), on line breaks in the codex's repeated sequences
  The idea the orientation test rests on is from Ottó Gyürk.
• Benedek Láng, The Rohonc Code: Tracing a Historical Riddle, Penn State Press, 2021.
  The standing survey of the manuscript is from Benedek Láng's book.
• The anonymous author of the 2014 open transcription.
  The open transcription is from its anonymous 2014 author.

What is not here

Király and Tokai's dictionary, transcription, page records and the library scans are not on this site. The one thing of theirs used is the shape of the signs. It is drawn from the outlines in their font. The font file itself is never served. The shapes are the sixteenth-century scribe's.

Their site is rechnitzer-kodex.hu, and it is the place to read them.

The working documents

The project's working documents are described here. They are working files written for whoever runs the project next. They are kept accurate rather than tidy. Anyone who wants one can ask for it.

• The full account The line-break measurement that started it, the dictionary, all seventeen attempts to extend it with the ten that failed, what the book turns out to say, and what none of it decides. The longest of them by far.
• The standing orders What the next person is to do, in order, and the arithmetic of how much of the book is still unread. Three earlier versions of that arithmetic were wrong and are kept on the page beside the right one. Published whole.
• The tests in full Every test with the bar it declared before it ran, the control it was measured against, and the saved run it produced.
• Where each file came from Every source, the terms it carries, what may be done with it, and one courtesy failure recorded so it is not repeated.
• The vocabulary before the guesses Why the words had to be checked before the bracketed restorations were, and what that changed.
• The blindfold test The one check the project cannot run on itself, written as instructions for a stranger.
• The last unread words The final few per cent of the manuscript, how they were closed, and what the attempt taught.

Ask for any of them at [email protected].

This rests on the Király and Tokai dictionary; their translation is unpublished; the readings here are this project's own.