Still less absurd than Data’s contractions (except all the times he actually used them). Maybe it was something he was programmed to tell humans so that even being superior to them, people would still be able to point to one thing they could do better.
They have the ability to pronounce ‘human’ correctly (e.g. “A human drink. It’s called root beer”). They choose to deliberately mispronounce it as an intimidation tactic.
My headcanon is that most of their speech is ferengi being translated by the universal translator, but when they say the word human they just use the human word for human which then goes untranslated.
It’s not even head cannon, this screenshot is legit not just from the episode, but from the scene where there’s an example of exactly what you described.
They can’t speak English though. In fact the scene this screenshot is from is them trapped in the past unable to communicate because their universal translators are offline. I would assume Quark speaks Federation Standard, but apparently that’s not close enough to English to figure out what they’re saying in the 40s
One thing I’ve always wondered, and this is hardly the most unbelievable aspect of the science fiction elements of this show but it’s one of the most pervasive and constant; why don’t we ever hear the native languages of the aliens underneath the sounds of the universal translators? Most, although not all, of them speak by vibrating the air, so where are those sounds disappearing to?
This was a plotpoint in DS9 where the UT didn’t picked up the nuances of a language but the mutants who were able to comprehend the language deciphered what was really meant.
I read a theory once that “daimon”, the Ferengi title for captain, could translate to “good/lead merchant” or something along those lines.
So if we assume that’s true, it’s possible that “hewmon” means something like “shitty merchant”, and it’s just pure coincidence it basically sounds like human.
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