Renee without the accented E gave back "R.E.N.I." which led me to believe that the alphabet was phonetic and the I was sounded like a long E. Usually, I'll get back Renée or something like that. The accent in my name confuses many programs. Renée gave back "R.E.N.K.AE.E" this is typical. My name gives issues for some programs.so I tried many versions to see what would happen. For a complete chart of the Man of Steel Kryptonian writing (and any future information), visit the Man of Steel Kryptonian Writing page. I have updated the site with info from various other forms of Kryptonian. I slight correction: the new symbol is actually a voiced glottal fricative and not a voiceless velar fricative.
#CYBERTRONIAN LANGUAGE TRANSLATOR UPDATE#
UPDATE 3:įinally all the base symbols are accounted for! The last one (bottom right) is the IPA which sounds like the ch in "Bach" or "loch". I've updated the consonant image with the new letter. I noticed that Steve over at Superman Homepage found another letter that I hadn't. I look forward to seeing if there will be any spoken Kryptonian in the movie. I was able to confirm that an unturned, unflipped consonant with no hooks above does indeed indicate the ɑo vowel/diphthong.įor those interested, this writing system is not an alphabet, it's an abugida.Īnother interesting note from the Deep Space Radio Wave Project website (Man of Steel viral marketing) is the phrase translated as "You are not alone." From this we can see some examples of Kryptonian words, and what appears to be SOV word order. I'll be sure to blog on any other information as I find it. However, I had nothing to do with its creation. I would like to make a special note that, oddly, this orthography is all extremely similar to work I started on in 2008 on a proto-Vath script (Vath being an island nation on early Krypton). I marked this potentially invalid combination with a question mark in the example below. It seems that just removing the consonant marker is not enough, though, as I couldn't get a syllable with the ɑ͡o vowel (diphthong). The orientation and the use of the smaller hooks indicate which vowel gets attached. While a large hook above always indicates a consonant sound only, take that away and you now have a consonant+vowel syllable. The consonant symbols can, it seems, be syllabic. 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. A consonant by itself always has a large hook above it.
The consonants also have a base set of characters. This character is rotated, flipped, or combined with a left or right small "hook" above the letter to indicate which vowel is represented. To start off, there is a base character for a vowel. This information is likely to be incomplete.
NOTE: all of this information is what I could glean from the above website.
After more playing around, I can say that, long story short, this writing system is a bit clever (and very pretty). In the example above, the ' wɛ' is the same symbol as the ' w' but turned 180° and missing the hook. Initially, one can also see that consonants have a large "hook" above them. If, however, you put in 'Wesley', the common spelling, you get back only 3 symbols: " wɛ.s.lɪ". While most of the time you will get a 1-to-1 font substitution, it appears as though there are some names that it recognizes for a "more precise translation" (for lack of better description).įor example, if you put in 'Weslie' (not a spelling it should have), you get back a one-to-one character string: " w.ɛ.s.l.ɪ.ɛ" (which isn't even very pronounceable). There is definitely more under the hood here than there seems to be on first blush. Then, as I played around with it, I noticed something even more interesting. The pronunciation for the for your returned result is using IPA, turned 'r' and all! That is definitely *not* typical for this sort of thing, and, to me, points to at least some involvement by a linguist or at least someone who knows a little more about what they're doing. I noticed something different right off the bat. It seemed to be just another cranked out piece of marketing that used a cipher / font-substitution just like DC has done since 2000 with the symbols that my alphabet is based off of.īut. So yesterday, Warner Brothers / DC released this little promotional piece for the Man of Steel movie, a Kryptonian name generator.Īt first blush, it seemed to me to be your typical schlack-I mean, how many of these types of things have we seen over the years? Answer a few questions, put in your first name, and get your "Kryptonian name".