Just as with pretty much any alphabet you’d find on Earth, the Kryptonian letters all have names. Here is the basic alphabet in the most common listed form (although different list arrangements do exist).

The listing shows (in order):

• The Kryptonian character
• The pronunciation (IPA)
• The letter’s name (in Kryptonese)
• The Kryptonese transliteration
• The keyboard mapping

Gendering Nouns

The Kryptonian language reflects natural gender in words through the use of its vowels. Please note that this gender is not word classification like you find in languages such as Spanish or German where all nouns carry a “gender”, but, rather, Kryptonian word gender only affects nouns that describe a living being that actually has (or implies, e.g. an android) a natural gender.

The gender of a gendered noun is determined by the first vowel of the word. The vowel may be “shifted” left or right on the vowel chart to change the gender of the word. For example, Ona /aonah/ (offspring) can become ina /inah/ (daughter) or una /unah/ (son). Dictionaries list gendered nouns in the neutral form with the gender-indicative vowel underlined.

Gendered Nouns and Politeness

Formal speech defers to the neutral gender whenever possible, while the gender-indicative forms are usually reserved for close personal or intimate speech. However, gender may be indicated in formal speech when it is needed for clarity — usually in 3rd person contexts or when speaking to more than one person. This formality applies in both directions in the social heirarchy, i.e., an underling would not use gendered speech with his superior nor vice versa.

The y vowel is considered to be a gender-neutral vowel, but should not be treated the same as the other vowels. y carries with it, not so much a sense of gender-neutrailty, as it does gender- all-inclusiveness. In gendered words, it is very uncommon (and less socially acceptable) to shift this vowel to a single-gendered entity (feminine: E or masculine: o).

This vowel can also be seen in some non-gendered words that may have carried gender in their original form, e.g., ZRyGRas /zrhygrhahs/ (city). This is evidenced by the fact that some of these words can be found in older texts, usually poetic in nature, in a gender-specific form, e.g., Kor-Fehn’s epic poem, ZRoGRas /zrhogrhahs/, universally translated as “City of Men.”

Rhotic Vowels

Kryptonian has special characters for rhoticized vowels. In essence, these characters are somewhere in-between diacritics and ligatures made from the combination of a vowel + r /r/.

Note: there is no rhotic version of y /y/ which never occurs before r /r/.

In the Kryptonian writing developed by Val-Zho, ideographs were chosen to represent the majority of closed class words and morphemes.

The free-morpheme logographs and ideographs, such as the symbol Ş meaning “hope,” are almost all holdovers from older languages and orthographies which were rendered obsolete by Val-Zho’s new language for the unified planetary government. As such, the records of the meanings of these symbols that survived the destruction of Krypton with Kal-El are far from exhaustive and sometimes contradictory. This is no doubt fueled by several factors like regional differences and dialects, semantic drift, and even historic and political pressures.

Verb Tense/Aspect Suffixes

Verb tense and aspect is indicated through suffixes. These suffixes are use and are aligned with the vowels on the vowel chart — another pedagogical reason to memorize the order layout of the vowel chart.

• Type 1 verbs in a sentence must take one of these suffixes.
• Type 2 verbs do not take these suffixes. Instead they are “irregular” with three unique forms carrying simple past/present/future aspects only.
• The bare form of the verb is used to form gerunds and infinitives.
  • Example of a gerund: “I like swimming.”
  • Example of an infinitive: “I want to swim.”

Pronouns

Almost all pronouns are gendered nouns. As you examine the pronoun chart alongside the vowel chart, you can see that the default form of each is neutral and the vowel can be shifted left or right to indicate feminine or masculine gender. Gendered forms of the pronouns are indicated with either one or two dots written below the logograph.

Again, this is indicative of actual, natural gender and is not a linguistic category.

• Politeness and Gender
  • Polite speech omits gender whenever possible/unnecessary. This translates to writing where the bare form of the pronoun logographs are gender-neutral.
  • The first-person plural pronoun is almost never gendered, and will stand out as highly unusual in practice. It’s better to avoid using feminine/masculine “we” unless you have strong reasons to do so.
• Personal / Animate / Inanimate
  • In Kryptonian, there are three sets of 3rd-Person pronouns:
    • PERSONAL: Used to refer to intelligent, sapient beings, e.g., Kryptonians, Humans, thinking robots/machines/AIs (like Braniac), etc.
    • ANIMATE: Used to refer to non-sapient living creatures, e.g., animals, pets, plants, etc.
    • INANIMATE: Used to refer to anything that falls outside of the above categories, e.g., objects, “dumb” robots/machines, etc. This pronoun is not gendered.
• Quantity
  • Neither of the first-person pronouns (I/we) can take the plural suffix (/o/).
  • The first-person plural pronoun (we) can take quantitative suffixes.
  • All other pronouns can take both plural and quantitative suffixes.
  • Example: /zhehd/ (he/her) → /zhehdo/ (they).