In reality, the glyphs are a cipher of Japanese. With the exception of numbers and a few special characters, each glyph is a stylized version of a katakana. A word written in Japanese phonology can be converted to Astral glyphs, by converting each syllable of the word to its katakana and then replacing each katakana with its corresponding Astral glyph. The long vowel marker, "ー", is replaced with the vowel it is prolonging. The syntax of the first line of an Xyz Monster's card text is: × ; for example, the material requirements for "Number C39: Utopia Ray" would be written as: ヒカリ／☆☆☆☆ × ３３３.