Supergirl Episode 313
Supergirl Episode 313: "Both Sides Now"
SPOILER WARNING!
At a climactic point in the episode, the two opposing Kryptonians, Supergirl and Purity, exchange some heated words in Kryptonian. For those that don't speak Kryptonian it was probably a fittingly dramatic climax to the confrontation; for those that do, though, it bordered on the comical side — questionable word choices, incorrect word order, nary a verb conjugation to be found. It's a good thing that they included translated subtitles or I never would have been able to figure out what they were actually trying to say. Yeah, grammatically, it was that bad.
Shameless plug: this is why the show could really use my help with translations and pronunciation.
Purity
Purity starts off by (reportedly) saying: "The three will walk across the land, and the blood of the weak will water the world." What I could make out was: /nim bao tahn chao nahn raoghis nim zhahgehv/ — the last word trailed off quite a bit, but after several listenings I'm pretty sure I got it right.
Pronunciation corrections:
- /bao/ → /:buahn/
- The colon (:) represents a letter in Kryptonian, the pre-nasal consonant. It's a little unique in that it will only ever appear in front of another voiced consonant at the beginning of a word (or at least at the beginning of a root stem) and its pronunciation is determined by the consonant that follows it, but it's still a consonant. What was pronounced as a one-syllable word, "bao", should have been the three-syllable word, /:buahn/ ("mmm-boo-ahn").
- /raoghis/ → /raogrhys/
- I've noticed that the actors tend to pronounce /y/ as "eeee" when it should always be pronounced as a short lax vowel like the y in "Krypton" or the i in "pit".
- I can't blame any English speaker for 1. not knowing how to pronounce /grh/ when they run across it (IPA:
[ʀ] ), or 2. not being able to pronounce it anyway. The sound is a uvular trill (you can find an audio sample on the Wikipedia page for uvular trill). The actors are doing more of a velar fricative, which I think is perfectly passable.
- /zhahgehv/ → /zhgehv/
- This one is really minor, but there shouldn't be a vowel between /zh/ and /g/. To think of a similar situation in English, imagine if someone pronounced "ski" as two syllables: "sah-kee".
Moving on to the actual translation is another matter — it's a mess. Literally, it's something like: "will be to walk land and be strength will be world". Like I said, without help I would have had no idea what they were going for. The number three doesn't even appear in the sentence. Another thing to point out in all of these is that Kryptonian has a simple conjunction, /chao/ ("and") which is only used within a clause/sentence. A different set of conjunction words are used to join clauses together (which is what they needed here and below); this is clearly indicated in the online dictionary, I'm just sayin'...
Here's a real translation into Kryptonian (with a little bit of liberty on the English to make it work better in Kryptonian).
Adapted from Supergirl, Season 3, Episode 13 (2018)
Supergirl
Supergirl's lines were much easier to hear and follow... maybe Benoist is getting a little more comfortable with doing Kryptonian? The lines were subtitled as "Rao defies you. I defy you. And I will bring you low." Here's what I heard her say: /rao rryp udoliv/, /kahp rryp udoliv/, /chao kahgir fah/.
Pronunciation corrections:
- /rryp/ → /rrip/ → /rraop/
- The /i/ in the word should be a tense vowel, "eeee" — /rrip/ rhymes with "keep" (not "rip").
- A Kryptonian speaker would only ever use the gender-neutral form of pronouns in the given context. So really the word should have been /rraop/. Using the gendered pronouns in this context just makes everything ... weird.
- /kahp/ → /khap/ → /khuhp/
- /kh/ is not a hard (plosive) "k" sound as in "bake", but a soft (fricative) "kh" as in "J.S. Bach".
- /khap/ rhymes with "cap" and "chap" (not with "cop" or "chop").
- The Same gendering comment as above applies. The word should have been /khuhp/ (rhymes with "cup").
- What makes the sentence even weirder is that with the combination of (trying) to use the gendered pronoun /khap/ ("me"), what was actually said was /khahp/ which is the masculine form.
- /kahgir/ → /kehgier/
- Breaking the word into its syllables, /kehg/ rhymes with "peg".
- The second syllable, /ier/, rhymes with "air". The /i/ before any other vowel is pronounced like the y in "you".
The translation here is no better than the other. Literally you get something like: "Rao you to rebel/sin", "me you to rebel/sin", "and move down". I have no idea why they put the verb at the end of the first two sentences, it makes no sense in either Kryptonian or English. The third sentence has neither subject nor object. Why?
To be fair, I didn't have a word for "to defy" before writing this. I have created it now for this translation.
Also to be fair, when you need to adjectivalize/adverbize an adposition in Kryptonian, you have to prefix it with /su-/, which I don't have anywhere on the site at the time of this writing, e.g., /fah/ ("I went down the ladder.") vs. /sufah/ ("I fell down.")
Here's a real translation into Kryptonian of Benoist's lines (again with a little bit of liberty on the English to make it work better in Kryptonian).
Comments (10)
David G:
Mar 25, 2018 at 01:23 AM
I swear they should just hire you at this point
ValeryaKrov:
Mar 25, 2018 at 04:31 PM
i am sooooooooo Gonna flood CW's Social media outlets with a link to this site.
Ben:
Apr 11, 2018 at 09:37 PM
Can I just say that I love you for doing all of this?
Quin B:
Apr 26, 2018 at 05:28 PM
You should get paid for doing this. Honestly. I'm intrigued and impressed.
aha:
Oct 09, 2018 at 08:11 AM
i somehow feel that kryptonian has a similar pronunciation as chinese or korean? like a lot of these when i speak it sounds like i have a korean accent, despite me not learning the language. but WOW is this COOL
Aisi:
May 18, 2019 at 10:59 PM
So cool, greetings from Lasi.
Perrin L. Rynning:
Jun 02, 2019 at 01:27 PM
One question I always wanted to ask Ms. Benoist involves her early years on Earth. "I can accept that Kara could have acquired a working knowledge of English by way of some relatively basic bit of Kryptonian technology. However, listening comprehension is different from speaking practice. To put it another way, how long do you think it took Kara to get rid of her 'Kryptonian accent'? Bonus question: what kind of teasing do you imagine Alex gave her about that accent?"
Ellen Tang:
Sep 22, 2020 at 06:31 PM
You were talking about how using the gendered pronouns was weird. In what case are gendered pronouns used rather than the neutral ones?
yasmine:
Sep 29, 2020 at 02:03 PM
has any of you guys watch supergirl at all i have a lot
Ellie:
Dec 22, 2020 at 06:24 PM
I wish we could get on with the study... I offer my work force to write an honest-to-Rao language textbook. It would be fun to meet and practice actually speaking Kryptonese as well ^^
Add a Comment