Bridwell Kryptonese

Bridwell Kryptonese Font

With the passing of Turniansky, it was unlikely that the font he created for this version of Kryptonian was ever going to see the light of day. Despite having fallen into disuse and obscurity, I still felt it a shame that the font didn’t exist. Now, I am pleased to announce that I have recreated the entire font with all 118 of Bridwell’s (ridiculous) letters, as well as Turniansky’s numbers and punctuation.

Since the original font was a low-res, bitmap font, I took a little bit of liberty by creating the characters as a more of a brush script similar to Chinese/Japanese writing. I felt that the font as a whole was served best by going with this style rather than a machine/mechanical look.

After having gone through every single letter in this alphabet, one thing is clear: Bridwell was definitely not a linguist. If he really needed to hit the 118-character target that he unwittingly set for himself, he would have been much better off creating a syllabary or an abugida (as both Schyer and the Petersons have done). As it is, there are many ludicrous consonant clusters represented — which is a bit fitting considering some of the ludicrous stories that came out of the Silver and Bronze age. I choose to view it as a fun homage to a bygone era.

Font Character Map

Most of the basic consonants are mapped logically to the keyboard, e.g. k=k, t=t, s=s, and so on. Some of the mappings for single consonants are borrowed from my own Kryptonian font, e.g. sh=S, th=T, ch=c, and so on. Likewise, vowels are mapped similarly to my font with a couple of differences and additions. Numbers and punctuation are all where you would expect (with a little caveat regarding quotation marks).

All the consonant cluster characters (and there are a TON) are just arbitrarily mapped to other characters. I attempted to use all the normal keys on the keyboard before using any of the special characters, and all of the special characters can be typed with option or option+shift key combinations on a Mac (these will be a little more tricky on Windows).

Bottom line: you can’t necessarily just type and expect the sounds of the Kryptonese characters match what you typed.

The list below shows the Kryptonese characters with phonetic value in IPA (in square brackets) and the font character each is mapped to.

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Vowels

Consonants

Consonant Clusters: (C)W

Consonant Clusters: (C)L

Consonant Clusters: (C)Y

Consonant Clusters: (C)R

Consonant Clusters: (C)+

Numbers

Punctuation

The opening and closing quotation marks are different. For these you can use either the curly quotes [“] [”] or use the straight double quote ["] for opening, and straight single quote ['] for closing.