User:Ejep520/Az-Kee

An Overview
In the beginning there was naught. And then there was. And in the fullness of time there came to be gnomes. While much could be (and has been) said about what came before there were gnomes, gnomes generally don't give that period much importance and tend to skip over most of it in their histories, as we will here.

In the far early days of Ak'Anon, there arose a dispute that threatened to tear the city asunder even before the Cataclysm was a whisper of a theory of a possibility on a whisker of chance. Two tribes of early gnome, the Az-Ka and the Eye-Beams, though they spoke the same language, had each, independently of the other, developed their own writing systems. Compromise could not be reached. One ordered their lowercase before their uppercase letters, their letters before their numbers and so forth, whereas the other did each in reverse. At an impasse and tensions mounting it seems almost inevitable, in hindsight, that someone would throw the first stone.

The Az-Ka
The Az-Ka, and their written language, Az-Kee was a calculated derivative of Tik-Tok. The words, the sentence structure and even the direction of the written prose (circular) could trace its roots back to the language of machines. It was simple, efficient, and clean; at least in their view. Converting it to and from Tik-Tok was a simple matter of simply choosing which spoken language you chose to read it in, as machines that spoke Tik-Tok could read it easily, even if they would get into disagreements about the punctuation and spelling.

The Eye-Beam
After the initial bout of violence between the tribes, The Eye-Beams, who took the name in recognition of an alliance of convenience with the gazers living in the mountains, based their language, Ebb-Sea-Deck on the Tik-Tok language as well, but using different syntax, punctuation and stopping points, would render a gear thoroughly unreadable to all but the most determined Az-Ka.

The Aftermath
The feud, which included several skirmishes and lost opportunities for peace was finally and decisively brought to an end approximately fifty years after it was revealed the gazers the Eye-Beams had made their alliance with were, in fact, only using them to practice their mind-controlling abilities on and fattening them up for later consumption. The gazers' entire plan went up in metaphorical smoke one late spring morning when, after an especially wet and warm winter, the sole mountain entrance to the cave system of the Eye-Beams collapsed, trapping them all. Gnomanitarian efforts were swift in coming, but in vein. By the time they were reached, the Az-Ka found only very well-fed, if bored gazers and little else.

With no Eye-Beams to pass down their written language, Ebb-See-Deck was lost to history. Az-Kee would morph and evolve over time to modern Gnomish. It is only since the cataclysm and thanks to the intrepid work of Archaeologists uncovering this fascinating bit of Gnomish history that we are able to tell any part of this story today.

OOC
ASCII (American Standard Coding for Information Interchange) and EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) are, though to a much lesser extent than written about above, competing encoding systems for the exchange of computer data. The story of the Fabled Uniform of Tango Foxtrot Eight (or UTF-8) will come later.