What Has Been Claimed, and What Became Of It A Sumerian prayer, a Vlach war chronicle, a Hindi gospel, and a Catholic prayer book. The four proposed readings do not agree about the content, the language, the century, or even which direction the writing runs.

A Sumero-Hungarian prayer refuted

Nyíri turned the pages upside down, identified what he took to be a Sumerian ligature, and matched the remaining symbols to Latin letters they resembled. On that basis he produced a reading whose opening runs:

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.

Gyürk, who had done the structural work a quarter of a century earlier, made the objection that matters: a method this permissive can produce any output the reader wants. If symbols may be matched to letters by resemblance, and the page may be rotated, and the language may be a composite of two unrelated ones, then the constraint that would make a correct answer recognisable has been removed. The reading cannot be wrong, which is precisely the problem. It also cannot be shown right by anything short of somebody else independently arriving at the same place, which has not happened.

There is a second difficulty, which is that the proposed relationship between Hungarian and Sumerian is itself a fringe position with no standing in linguistics. A reading resting on it starts from a premise most of its potential readers reject.

A Vlach war chronicle refuted

The most ambitious of the four by a distance, and the one that has done most to shape the codex's popular reputation. Enăchiuc, a Romanian philologist, read the text as a dialect of vulgar Latin spoken in Dacia, running right to left and bottom to top, and produced a complete translation: a history of the Vlachs in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, at war with the Hungarians and the Pechenegs.

Her text is specific in a way that invites checking. It names places that can be found on a map, including Arad, Dridu, Olbia, Ineu, Rărău, the Dniester and the Tisza. It has a voivode named Vlad in diplomatic contact with three named Byzantine emperors: Constantine Doukas, Alexios I Komnenos, and Robert of Flanders.

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.

Two objections sank it. The first is technical and fatal: she transliterated the same symbol as different letters in different places. Whatever patterns the original text contains were therefore destroyed in the transcription, and any regularity in the output is a property of her choices rather than of the manuscript. This is the single most important failure mode in the whole subject and it recurs below.

The second objection is that the 87 illustrations are overwhelmingly Christian devotional scenes, with crucifixions and biblical narrative, which have no evident connection to a chronicle of Vlach military campaigns. A translation that cannot account for the pictures in the book it is translating has a problem it cannot argue away.

Her work did leave one durable mark. The Romanian spelling Rohonczi spread through later writing on the subject because of it.

A Hindi infancy gospel refuted

Singh read the script as an undocumented variant of Brahmi, running left to right and top to bottom, encoding Hindi. His reading of the opening produces a devotional text that parallels the New Testament infancy narrative:

he bhagwan log bahoot garib yahan bimar aur bhookhe hai / inko itni sakti aur himmat do taki ye apne karmo ko pura kar sake 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.

It was criticised in the same issue of the journal that carried it, which tells you how quickly the defect was visible. The transliteration is not consistent, exactly as Enăchiuc's was not. The two readings agree on nothing except the flaw.

It is worth pausing on what it means that a devotional reading and a military-chronicle reading can both be extracted from the same 448 pages. It does not mean the codex is meaningless. It means the method being used cannot tell the difference between finding a meaning and imposing one.

A Catholic prayer book taken seriously

Tokai is an art historian at the Hungarian National Gallery. Király is a computer scientist who began working on the manuscript privately in 2005. They came at it from opposite ends, Tokai through the pictures and Király through the text, found the same things without knowing of each other, and then published together. That independent convergence is itself a piece of evidence, and none of the three failed readings has anything like it.

What they report:

• The writing is not a substitution cipher, which is what nearly every earlier attempt assumed. It behaves as a code, in which small groups of symbols stand for whole words and the internal structure of those words is not represented. That is why every frequency-based attack for a century and a half had failed: there was nothing there for it to bite on.
• There is a number system with dedicated symbols for powers of ten. Numbers were the way in, because a number in a devotional book is very often a chapter, a verse or a date, and can be guessed from context when nothing else can.
• Structural features recovered before any content: coded INRI inscriptions on the drawn crosses, codes standing for the evangelists followed by numbers, a seven-page table of contents, and chapter headings carrying biblical references.
• Specific passages match identifiable text, including Matthew 25:15, the parable of the talents, and a chronology of the life of the Virgin with dates in a count of years from the creation of the world.
• The content as a whole is an ordinary Catholic reader or breviary, mostly paraphrase of the Gospels, with some non-biblical devotional material including prayers to the Virgin and an account of Seth returning to the gate of Paradise. A date in the text points to 1593.

They also record damage that anyone who has followed the Voynich Manuscript will recognise: bifolios missing, leaves swapped and reordered, and a later foliation that misleads rather than helps.