ZRymohed kryptanIA

Kryptonian writing is comprised of a combination of alphabetic and ideographic characters. The alphabet is used to write the majority of the language, while the ideographs are relegated almost exclusively to the bound morphology of the language (e.g. verb tenses), particles, and adpositions.

The Basic Alphabet

The basic 33-letter alphabet is comprised of 24 consonants and 9 vowels. When written, the consonants are arranged into 8 "rays" arranged around the "hub" containing 3 columns of vowels for a total of 11 lines to represent the 11 Kryptonian virtues (the Girod). In addition, each letter on the outer portion finds its "pair" on the exact opposite side of the arrangement; for example, for the top (and bottom) three rays voiced and unvoiced pairs are formed. This arrangement is very similar to the arrangement of the Kryptonian flag. The two were, in fact, made at nearly the same time, and the designs were intended to reflect one another.

Beyond the Basics

The Kryptonian alphabet itself is a bit more complicated than the Roman alphabet as used in the English language. There are 2 digraphs that represent unique sounds (similar to the English "ch", "th", and "sh"). In addition to these, Kryptonian adds a 10th vowel (/y/ <y>) that is not considered part of the base alphabet, stacking letters, letters with diacritics (that could almost be mistaken for new letters), and 2 diphthongs written with their own ligatures.

The Ideography

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...

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.