Ideography Overview

Based on feedback, it seems that this aspect of Kryptonian writing is the most popular. I'm guessing because this form of writing is the most foreign (and, thus, attractive) to native English speakers. I also think that it has become popular (mainly via sinographs) to utilize a single symbol to "mysteriously" display some important thing or other... which is, I guess, perfect for tattoos... you'd be surprised how often people ask me about this for the purpose of a tattoo...

Usage

The mainstream use of ideographs in Kryptonian society, as noted above, was almost exclusively used not for "cool" things like "Truth" or "Power" or "I Heart Mom", but for your mundane grammatical functions like "present progressive tense" or "imperative" or "instrument". As noted elsewhere, there were several ideographs that represented things like "hope" and so forth, but these were rarely in widespread use - especially in day-to-day writing (they were mostly ceremonial in use and, even then, rarely) and varied widely in their representation from location to location. The free-morpheme ideographs are almost all hold-overs 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 these symbols that survived the destruction of Krypton with Kal-El were far from exhaustive.

The Symbols

Particles

Pronouns

Note that the gender-neutral pronunciation is provided. For more information on pronouns, please the pronouns page. Gender can be indicated on on the pronoun by a single dot (feminine) or two dots (masculine) below the pronoun symbol, with the exception of the inanimate pronoun which does not carry gender.

Also note: The absence of a dot does not preclude the use of the gendered form.

Honorofics

All but one of the honorofics also serve as familial possessives. Please see the familial possessives page for more information. However, note here that there is no 3rd person familial non-sentient honorific… so, in Kryptonian, the effect of calling your cat "Mr. Whiskers" with a familial honorific would, more often than not, be more demeaning to you (or someone else)—implying you/they are related to an animal—than anthropomorphic to your cat.

Verb Prefixes

Verb Suffixes

Verb tense and aspect is indicated through suffixes. The vowels in these suffixes conveniently conform to the vowel chart (fig. 1)—yet another reason to learn the vowel chart ordering.