Q’s Home Planet
Node LinkNext[ Cut to Quark’s holodeck - everyone is there. ]
Q: Greetings people. I have given Quark a holodeck module for a demonstration - nothing special about it. What you’re about to see happened in my race’s home planet over 6 milliard years ago. We just broke up from the reign of an empire called the “Ivrim”. They were not too good and not too bad. [Reference: Monty Python's Life of Brian - "What Have The Romans Ever Done For Us?"]
Q: As such we adopted their language, only with many errors.
Katie: Modern Hebrew?
Q: Precisely.
Q: Anyway, we also had another language, universal on our continent which we called Énglish. It was just like modern English only pronounced phonetically. Rather hideous. This language was considered holy - everyone knew it, but people were afraid to talk in it. It was reserved for the “perophets”, who were people who talked with the “Bey-de-jor-eans”, who were our gods.
Kira: Hmmmpppfff…
Sisko: Hmmpppf indeed. What is the reason for all these coincidences?
Q: The Universe is coincidental, Captain, for some reasons which even we don’t fully understand yet. And for the record, even we were preceded by different races of humanoids.
Sisko: I see. Go on.
Q: In any case, there was this relatively mature man in our time called No’ach who had three sons.
Katie: Shem, Cham and Yepheth? [in Modern Hebrew pronunciation]
Q: You guessed it. He was a quirky, paranoid, fellow. At one point he sensed a storm coming, and believed that the world was coming to an end. So he, his wife, his sons, and all of his livestock travelled up a nearby mountain, and waited for the storm to end. [Pictures are shown]
Q: When the storm ended, he went down to the nearby village, and saw that while there was a lot of damage, the people there were perfectly fine. However, he claimed that it was high time to put an end to such problems, to end having to depend on natural whims, that our society will flourish.
Q: I was there: my name was indeed “Que” and I was considered a strange nomad, who just happened to be around. I decided to take upon myself the establishment of the [in Énglish] “civilisation” instead of the many different [in Énglish] “cultures”.
Q: Now, there were many kids in the village who seemed to be amused by all that. One thing was that they often had trouble pronouncing Shem’s name with a “Sh” sound and instead used “S” - “Sem”. People found it annoying, but the children couldn’t care less.
Q: Back then, writing systems were still hideously complex, and practically no one used them. So I told the kids to come up with a good writing system. They decided to collect 26 symbols of the signature signs of some people in the village, and figure out a way to write using it.