Suh Ankripton: The New Kryptonian Language from Superman
The latest from Jessie and me is Suh Ankripton: the new Kryptonian language from Superman (2025). It shows up in a key (but minor) way in the new film, though you'll hear it again in future (and a lot more of it). It's head-initial: SVO and inflectional, with verbs that are meatier than we expected... Eventually I'll put the dialogue from the movie up on my AO3, but I want to wait until people have had a chance to see it, as the dialogue plays a key role in the film. Look for that in the coming weeks!
are you telling me his name is Baby
I love these tags, since literally the ONLY canon for the Kryptonian language is that Kal-El means "star child", and in every canon source except for one (where the writer clearly made a mistake), Kal = child, and El = star. (Which makes sense, as Kal-EL, Jor-El, etc. all come from the House of El, and, really, does it make more sense that they come from the House of the Star or the House of the Child?)
I guess that man's name really is Baby!
This is true. It is also true that the English word for “baby” is child. Here are some famous examples with translations:
All My Children = “all my babies”
Children of a Lesser God = “babies of a lesser god”
Children of the Corn = “babies of the corn”
“Sweet Child O’ Mine” = “sweet baby of mine”
Childish Gambino = “babyish Gambino”
Children of Dune = “babies of Lekis”
It’s unclear why English stopped using the word baby, but many linguists suspect it’s due to the success of the 1991 crossover hit “Baby Baby” by Amy Grant. According to the theory, the song was…too sexy. After that English speakers collectively forgot what baby meant, assuming it only meant something like “loved one”, and then, over the years, it was replaced periodically by a new slang term.
(Oh, and then the space time disruption caused by Amy Grant’s undeniable hotness caused the semantics of “baby” to filter backward in time, like that episode of TNG where Picard causes that anomaly in the future that gets bigger as you go back in time. That entire episode was inspired by Amy Grant—in the future!)
