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May 28, 2013: Breaking Down the "Man of Steel" Kryptonian Language

For the past few days I've been toiling away trying to break down the written Kryptonian language using the "Glyph Creator" app, trying to come up with an English to Kryptonian translation guide. I thought I was making good progress, until I came across an article at Kryptonian.info.

    To start off, there is a base character for a vowel. This character is rotated, flipped, or combined with a left or right small "hook" above the letter to indicate which vowel is represented.

    Kryptonian Translation Chart

    The consonants also have a base set of characters. A consonant by itself always has a large hook above it. Thankfully, this is definitely not a substitution font as there are no characters like "x" which can (and should) be portrayed with "ks" or the like.

    Kryptonian Translation Chart

    The consonant symbols can, it seems, be syllabic. While a large hook above always indicates a consonant sound only, take that away and you now have a consonant+vowel syllable. The orientation and the use of the smaller hooks indicate which vowel gets attached. It seems that just removing the consonant marker is not enough, though, as I couldn't get a syllable with the ao vowel (diphthong). I marked this potentially invalid combination with a question mark in the example below.

    Kryptonian Translation Chart

Kryptonian Translation Chart For what it's worth (and I openly admit I'm not a linguistic expert and had never heard of a diphthong before), the English/Kryptonian Translation Chart (on the right) is my attempt at coming up with a simple guide to translating the language associated with the "Man of Steel" movie. My Chart does not take into account vowel combinations nor does it make any reference to the line or hooks above each symbol as mentioned in the Kryptonian.info web page.


2013 Movie News

Listed below are all the Movie News items archived for 2013 organized into various categories:

“Man of Steel” Movie News:

“Superman/Batman” Movie News: “Justice League” Movie News: “Superman: Unbound” Animated Movie News: “Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox” Animated Movie News: “Justice League: War” Animated Movie News: Christopher Reeve Movie News: Other Movie News:

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