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I'm a fan of Ian M. Banks' Culture novels, but I'd like to suggest, respectfully, that they might be improved in their approach to matters linguistic. As an example, on p. 470 of his recently-released novel Matter, we learn that "Marain, the Culture's language, had a phoneme to denote upper case".

Linguists would usually call a unit that denotes something a morpheme (or perhaps a word), not a phoneme, even if it was only one phoneme long. (In fact, we sometimes find meaningful units whose effect on pronunciation is just a single feature.)

In addition, it's odd to find a morpheme that signals something essentially in the realm of writing, like alphabetic case; and also to find that Marain still uses upper case in (some of) the same ways that English does.



Some context may help to clarify why this passage puzzled me. Djan Seriy, an agent of Special Circumstances, is trying to get back to her home, the 8th level of the shellworld Sursamen, to deal with the death of her father. Traveling on the Morthanveld Great Ship Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown, she visits the 303rd Aliens' Lounge, where she meets an attractive stranger.

"And you," she said, remembering to be polite. "Where are you from? May I ask your Full Name?"

"Astle-Chulinisa Klatsli LP Quike dam Uast."

"LP?" she said. "The letter L and P?"

"The letters L and P," he confirmed, with a small nod and a mischievous smile.

"Do they stand for something?"

"They do. But it's a secret."

She looked at him doubtfully.

He laughed, spread his arms. "I'm well traveled, Ms Seriy; a Wanderer. I am older than I look, I have met many people and given and shared and received many things. […] I am not the person I was when I took my Full Name, and I am not definable just by that any more. A nested mystery in the centre of my name is no more than I deserve. Trust me."

Dyan Seriy thought about this. He had called himself a Wanderer (they were talking Marain, the Culture's language; it had a phoneme to denote upper case).

So, does this "phoneme" occur at the start of every sentence, and in the initial letters of proper names, as well as in certain words used as terms of art, like "Wanderer"? This passage suggests, not for the first time, that Banks is confused about the difference between a language and a writing system.

Of course, it might be that the Culture, along with its other advanced technologies, has finally achieved the goal of Enlightenment thinkers like John Wilkins, who tried to design "philosophical" languages with a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters, and in which the sequence of sounds or letters in each word would encode a sort of Dewey Decimal system of ontological classification. Over the past few centuries, we've learned why this is a bad idea from a semantic point of view (see Jorge Luis Borges' 1929 essay El Idioma Analítico de John Wilkins for a form of the counter-argument) and also from a phonetic point of view (see here for some discussion).

Maybe the Culture's biological manipulations of the human stock, including more-or-less eternal life and the ability to change size, shape and sex at will, have changed the characteristics that make "duality of patterning" a good linguistic idea. However, I've never seen any indication in Banks' works that he has this sort of thing in mind. Instead, I'm afraid that he just has some form of the usual naive ideas about the structure of language and the relations between speech and writing.

Klatsli Quike, to call the handsome stranger by his non-full name, turns out to be an avatoid of the Liveware Problem, a modified Delta-class General Contact Unit. A bit later in the story, he communicates covertly with Djan Seriy by flashing patterns from a laser built into his retina,

expressed in nonary Marain, the nine-part binary base of the Culture's language.

From explanations elsewhere in Banks' works, we know that "nonary" doesn't mean that the system's coding is actually base nine, but rather that the symbols in the Marain alphabet (and presumably its phoneme inventory) can be represented as 3×3 bit patterns. The resulting set of 512 symbols is larger than alphabets (or phoneme inventories) typically are; it's a plausible size for a syllabary — but it's not at all clear, as far as I know, what the mapping to pronunciation is actually like, or what it means in that context to have "a phoneme to denote upper case". Is one of the 512 symbols devoted to this? or one of the nine bits?

Banks doesn't write "hard" science fiction, and the lack of (pseudo-)explanations for displacement and mind-reading and the like in his works doesn't bother me. The problem that I have with his linguistic inventions is not that they're mysterious, but rather that they're too specific in puzzlingly implausible ways.

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