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 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. ( )