Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Lois & Clark Kryptonese

I thought it was just the slightest bit peculiar that New Kryptonians spoke English and wrote in a totally different ideographic system. lol. They didn't even attempt to make it like they spoke Kryptonese, and then had some kind of device or power that allowed them to understand and speak English. It is canon that New Kryptonians had telepathic powers -- they coulda just played on that heavily, if they didn't want to make up a whole new language like Tolkien did on The Lord of the Rings or like Lucas did for Star Wars for some of the creatures -- ya know, to emphasize their alien-ness from the cast.

I just find the whole thing very odd. It's a gaping hole in the logic surrounding the show's mythos, IMHO.

They borrowed some of Star Fleet's universal translators.

cheers,
Lynn

It would have taken a few words to make it work. Just laziness on the part of the scriptwriters, I'm afraid.

Incidentally, if you want to use Kryptonese there's a vocabulary here:
http://kryptonian.info/vocabulary.html

It never needed to do so on Star Trek; well, except when the plot demanded it, of course. Besides, Jor El had to know a lot about earth to determine that it was a good place to send Kal El. In The Foundling, he went on to say, "We give you to Earth, to a realm called America, and a place called Kansas." if he knew the name of the state he was sending Kal El to, he must also have picked up some of our radio transmissions or in some other way learned some English. If he was able to do this, then whoever programmed their UTs would have, as well.

Of course, if they got them from Star Fleet, they would already have had plenty of exposure to English.

Or maybe there is a UT built into each of our television sets.

Well, enough of this silliness...

cheers,
Lynn

@Lynn: yeah, it may have been a UT thing. I guess I just wanted to have a few words to geek over and learn. lol.


@Marcus: yeah... if the show's writers were but half as enthusiastic as a lot of the fic writers in this comm, we'd probably still have the show, and we'd have Lois and Clark dealing with super-teenagers by now. lol.

LOL, and it certainly would have proven or dis-proven Nan's take on Super-aging

BTW, various stories here took care to explain the language stuff. Most recently Corrina's Awaken my Heart. And there's Wedding Crashers. I think ML's solved the problem, too, in Escape form New Krypton. And how many of the other NK-themed fics?

As for the show. I guess it comes with the territory (TV) but whenever there's non-English speakers meeting the protagonists of a US show, they end up speaking English most of the time. I guess, Star Fleets Universal Translator is already invented and comes in the form of a 4x3 glass tube

Michael

@Michael: thanks for the directions. I think the Kryptonese-English dictionary Marcus recommended is interesting though. I wish they had a website about its grammar and stuff. It'd be nice to be able to actually speak Kryptonese, and use it the way The LOTR fans do amongst themselves when they convene.

Well, this seems a little appropriate to drop a thought that's been bugging me for some years.
Did you ever notice how the bad guys have British English accents in American programs?
The NKers spoke with a overly pronounced English accent in LnC. I've noticed it in other programs too, among them Star Trek.

Artemis

This site is the page of the unofficial Kriptonian language project. There're alphabet, grammar, writing, vocabulary and other curiosities. It's a very interesting material.

Andreia

@Artemis: Subliminal hatred for red-coats? XD

Hey Artemis,

Even Zod on Smallville has a British accent! I've often wondered about that, too.

SQD

Hi SQD and Saori. Exactly my thoughts. Zod and Nor both had British accents. Jor-El does too in Smallville. Sometimes he doesn't seem too friendly to Kal-El.

Artemis

Yes, we're evil...


But seriously, so does movieverse Zod....

I guess they were trying to stress how different villains were from Superman by having them talk differently. I must say though, I feel a bit slighted. How come they don't use villains with Japanese accents?

Be careful what you wish for, Sayo...Trust me, you do NOT want to see some of the propaganda that came out of Hollywood during and shortly after World War II!

Joy,
Lynn

@Lynn: I heard talk about the red and white rays behind Kung Fu Panda Po being Imperialist Japanese propaganda and laughed my head off. lol. The Empire's been dead for quite some time. Tenno Heika (His Imperial Majesty)'s is just a figurehead now. The Empress is even a commoner. That's how much the Chrysanthemum Throne doesn't give a hoot anymore.

But that's another thread entirely.

Has anyone seen a site about how to write Kryptonese? I saw the markings on Clark's ship on "Strange Visitor" and it looks so much like, well, Japanese. I don't think we'll have any trouble learning it, and it'll be a nice thing if we can send Xmas cards to each other in Kryptonese.

Dear Saori:

One thing I've wondered - I understand that Japanese is ideographic, like Chinese, where one word or idea is expressed by a single symbol.

But I've also heard that there's an alphabetical (or syllablary?) script, kata kana?

Am I mistaken? Can you explain Japanese writing?

@IolantheAlias:

Gladly! ^_^ Ooh, and you can call me Sayo. All my friends call me Sayo.

In Japanese we use three separate syllabaries.

We have hiragana/furugana -- the simple, rounded symbols we use for native Japanese words;

there's katakana -- the square-ish symbols for foreign words like say names and other things that are not native Japanese;

and then there's kanji -- borrowed chinese characters which we use either as ideographs or for their phonetic value. kanji are usually used to convey ideas but one kanji character can mean different things according to context.

For example:

私 は ロイス と クラーク が 大好き.
Watashi wa Roisu to Kura-ku ga dais'ki.
I love Lois and Clark

Watashi (the first character) is "I" and Daisuki "love" (or one of the ways to say love) are in kanji

wa (be-verb) to (and) and ga (indicates the object in the sentence) are in hiragana.

Lois and Clark's names are in katakana.

ロイス - Lois (Roisu)
クラーク - Clark (Kura-ku)

Well...if Clark can learn 300 plus languages in a few years, it might be in part due to his latent telepathy, or because the kryptonian brain is particularly gifted with languages. Either way, it's likely that they wouldn;t have much trouble learning to speak english. Considering that Clark is to be their king or whatever, and that he DOESN"T speak Kryptonese, one could assume that they were speaking english around him out of protocol.

One might wonder why they don't speak kryptonian among themselves when in Smallville, but maybe they wanted the earthlings to know what they were saying. Arrogance with all that power....

@Shayne: Yeah, I suppose they would have advanced mental capacities and all that, but it'd have been wonderful if we'd gotten a sampling of them speaking Kryptonese amongst themselves or prior to them having assimilated English using their advanced learning capabilities.