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 …