mu' HaqwI' ("word surgeon") is a program which analyzes words of the
Klingon language for their components, suffixes, prefixes etc.
It is also a dictionary and the GUI version even comes with some
handy charts built in.
What is this Klingon thing?
Well, Klingons are an alien people which appears on the Star Trek®
TV series. Sometime back Paramount decided to give them a real language of
their own, and hired linguist Marc Okrand. Thus the Klingon language
became a real, useable language, with grammar rules and
a vocabulary of some 1800 words. It is documented in the book
"The Klingon Dictionary" by Marc Okrand. For even more info on
Klingon, see the WWW site of the
Klingon Language Institute.
The Vocabulary
Every dictionary needs some vocabulary, and so does mu' HaqwI'. To make
updating the vocabulary easy, it is kept in a seperate text file (usually
called 'mutay.txt') that can be used by every version of the program, be it
on a UNIX machine, a Mac or whatever you get it to run on :-). This also
makes it possible to update the vocabulary independent from the program
itself.
Every distribution contains the vocabulary file that was current
at the time that version was released. Even though you may have
the current version of the program, the vocabulary that came with it
may be outdated. In that case you should download the current
vocabulary file from this page (in the 'For Download' section below).
To determine whether your vocabulary file is outdated, open your copy
of the file with your favourite text editor and check the last date
in the 'Change History' table against the date in the link below.
Contacting the Author
If you have any comments or suggestions on mu' HaqwI', please tell me!
You can send me email at
chrisp@ardanwen.sax.de.
Current Versions
mu' HaqwI' comes in two-and-a-half flavours: full GUI for Macintosh users
and character based portable for everyone else (including the possibility
for use as CGI-Bin). The Macintosh version also includes some handy charts
(e.g. suffixes). I'm still looking for people willing to port the GUI to
other platforms. If you'd like to do it, please contact me at the address
given above.