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THE CULTURE: ESSAY 2 | A Few Notes on Marain
Much shorter than the first essay, because more tightly focused: that one was both broad and from a high-level vantage. This one is almost a dictionary entry on Marain, an artificial language created by Culture Minds and pan-humans for both expediency among various cultures, and also for moral objectives.
The essay also outlines the standard Marain writing system, based in a default matrix of bytes (9-digit binary numbers) representing phonemes. A table lists the 32 "most-used" letter-phonemes, illustrated with various versions of signs denoting each. Presumably could be used to decipher various examples of Marain in jacket illustrations across different editions of the Culture novels.
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The show more Culture novel The Player of Games directly addresses the Sapir-Whorf approach taken by Banks: language is stated to mold the mental outlook and processing of its speakers, and Marain sets deliberate goals on those points. Wikipedia entry on Culture notes the Sapir-Whorf approach explicitly. Banks in this essay makes no mention of Sapir-Whorf nor relative linguistic theory.
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My copy of the essay accessed through fan-fiction author Trevor Hopkins's Culture website, acknowledging Banks copyright but not providing any other detail on its provenance, nor indeed evidence it is Banks's work. show less
Much shorter than the first essay, because more tightly focused: that one was both broad and from a high-level vantage. This one is almost a dictionary entry on Marain, an artificial language created by Culture Minds and pan-humans for both expediency among various cultures, and also for moral objectives.
The essay also outlines the standard Marain writing system, based in a default matrix of bytes (9-digit binary numbers) representing phonemes. A table lists the 32 "most-used" letter-phonemes, illustrated with various versions of signs denoting each. Presumably could be used to decipher various examples of Marain in jacket illustrations across different editions of the Culture novels.
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The show more Culture novel The Player of Games directly addresses the Sapir-Whorf approach taken by Banks: language is stated to mold the mental outlook and processing of its speakers, and Marain sets deliberate goals on those points. Wikipedia entry on Culture notes the Sapir-Whorf approach explicitly. Banks in this essay makes no mention of Sapir-Whorf nor relative linguistic theory.
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My copy of the essay accessed through fan-fiction author Trevor Hopkins's Culture website, acknowledging Banks copyright but not providing any other detail on its provenance, nor indeed evidence it is Banks's work. show less
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Iain Banks was born in Fife in 1954 and was educated at Stirling University where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. Banks came to widespread and controversial public note with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. His first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas, was published in 1987. He continued show more to write both mainstream fiction (as Iain Banks) and science fiction (as Iain M. Banks). Banks' mainstream fiction included The Wasp Factory (1984), Walking on Glass (1985), The Bridge (1986), Espedair Street (1987), Canal Dreams (1989), The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993), Whit (1995), A Song of Stone (1997), The Business (1999), Dead Air (2002) and The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007). His final book, The Quarry, was released posthumously on June 20, 2013. Banks died on June 9, 2013 of terminal gall bladder cancer. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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