In the seventh-season Voltron Legendary Defender episode “The Road Home,” Coran and Romelle sing the Altean equivalent of the English “alphabet song” — the “ABCs.” The lryics are:
♪ Exus, plexis, ceedus, flee,
jaydus, nacto, pledum, ree ♪
♪ Joodum, ruu, and leeum too
That puts us just halfway through ♪
♪ There’s mai-ox, kay, and jibley-way
Afus, nofus, youkus-play ♪
♪ Beefur, leefur, agus-play ♪
♪ At the end, flancko and blee! ♪
It’s almost a certainty that the show’s writers created this song purely on a whim, just to give the Paladins another source of annoyance during their long journey to Earth. Having said that, let’s look more closely at the song, in typical Lions and Pilots and Bots Dot Com geeky fashion.
Letters
According to the Altean alphabet song, the Altean language includes 22 letters. We don’t know which are consonants and which are vowels — or indeed whether the Altean alphabet even has such concepts.
It’s also worth noting that many letters start with the same phonemes. Examples include…
| Phoneme | Letter(s) |
|---|---|
| Short e (as in “egg”) | exus |
| pl | plexis, pledum |
| s | ceedus |
| fl | flee, flancko |
| j | jaydus, joodum, jibley-way |
| n | nacto, nofus |
| r | ree, ruu |
| l | leeum, leefur |
| m | mai-ox |
| k | kay |
| Short a (as in “apple”) | afus, agus-play |
| y | youkus-play |
| b | beefur, blee |
At first glance, it seems that at least some letters aren’t named for their phonemes. For example, if there were an Altean word that sounds like “bell”…
- Which letter might make the b sound? Beefur? Blee?
- Which letter might make the l sound? Leeum? Leefur?
Glyphs
Throughout Voltron Legendary Defender, we catch glimpses of Altean text, featuring distinctive glyphs. There’s no way to know how all of these might match the letters that were identified in the Altean alphabet song, but it’s still fun to look at them!
In search of Altean alphabetic glyphs, I skimmed three episodes of Voltron Legendary Defender: “Eye of the Beholder,” “Reunion,” and “The Colony.” I found at least 27 — possibly 28 — glyphs. Each episode revealed glyphs that weren’t in the other episodes. The glyphs that I identified are shown below.
With 27 or more glyphs, and only 22 letters in the Altean alphabet, it’s clear that there can be no one-for-one mapping between glyphs and letters. Maybe Altean uses cases (upper case, lower case, etc.) like English does, or some other means of giving each letter multiple glyphs.
Whatever the case, after finding new Altean glyphs in each of the three episodes that I checked, I decided to stop. It looks like Romelle and Bandor were thinking the same thing in “The Colony.”
