“ 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.
