How to Read the Signs on ‘Krypton’

Syfy’s Krypton premieres tonight, giving audiences a look at Superman’s home planet of Krypton set 200 years before its demise.

While the show is set around the Man of Steel’s grandfather, Seg-El (Cameron Cuffe) as he and Earth-born time-traveler Adam Strange (Shaun Sipos) work together to save Krypton from Brainiac, and, thus, maintain a timeline where Superman exists, the show is also full of visual treats — including various signs written in the Kryptonian language, such as the one below.

Yes, those symbols really do have meaning, and we’re here to help you learn how to read them.

The Kryptonian language — specifically the written language — has an interesting history in DC Comics. Early on, Kryptonian writing was largely represented as random lines and squiggles with a vaguely alien look and feel. However, around the 1970s, E. Nelson Bridwell and his successor Al Turniansky attempted to organize the random squiggles into a 118-letter alphabet. They referred to it as “Kryptonese,” and while it didn’t directly represent words when used in comics (there was no way to actually translate the Kryptonese into English) it was the standard used by DC until John Byrne‘s 1986 reboot of the Superman universe.

With Crisis on Infinite Earths, Superman not only got a re-imagined origin, but Kryptonian’s got a new written language too. A more geometric and symbol-based alphabet replaced the squiggles, but like their predecessor, didn’t really hold much meaning until 2000. That’s when DC Comics introduced a transliteration alphabet for the “Kryptonian” language. What that means is that each symbol in “Kryptonian” has an English-language match letter-for-letter. To understand what the Kryptonian symbols are, one just has to use a simple cypher.

And, thanks to a detailed website, such a cypher exists. Darren Doyle began an unofficial Kryptonian language project in 2003 and on his website, he has a cypher that helps you match up the Kryptonian symbols to their English-language counterparts. While it’s important to note that Kryptonian is not a true language and is, instead, a simple substitution of letters in the English language, it’s still fun to “translate” from Kryptonian. You can check out Doyle’s Kryptonian cypher.

So, what does that sign in the photo say? By matching the symbols to their corresponding English letters in Doyle’s cypher, we discover that the sign reads “Kem’s Bar”. As for what part Kem’s Bar plays on Krypton? You can tune in tonight and find out.

Krypton airs Wednesday nights at 10/9c on SYFY.