“Hulo!” means “hooray!” and“go buy!”
Tip of the tongue / One of the things we’ll be watching closely when the numbers from the 2010 U.S. Census begin to trickle in: the percentage of Hawaii residents who speak the Hawaiian language. In 2000, the last time the Census Bureau checked, it was fewer than one person in 1,000. Now, more than 30 years into the Hawaiian renaissance and almost 25 years since the start of the Punana Leo immersion charter school movement, there’s reason to believe the next set of numbers will show dramatic growth for for ka ‘olelo Hawaii.
One very small yet very encouraging sign was the surprise holiday popularity of Kamehameha Publishing’s Hulo!, a Hawaiian word game. Word on the street–literally, on Fort Street, during a holiday gift fair–was that the $12 game was selling briskly at Na Mea Hawaii and elsewhere.
Hulo!, despite its old-fashioned newspaper tile design, is a perfectly contemporary game–it’s like multiplayer, real-time Scrabble in Hawaiian. Players dump the wooden tiles onto a table–no board here–and begin making as many words as they can. To accommodate varying levels of familiarity with the language, place and other proper names are allowed, as are two-letter words, and because the tiles are modeled after 19th-century Hawaiian newspapers, Hulo! does not use diacritical marks. In place of double- or triple-word score squares on a Scrabble board, Hulo! incorporates special tiles that alter game play. “Hema” forces players to pass two tiles to their left, “Ku!” can be used to stop another player’s momentum and “Ea” gives a player, yes, sovereignty over her own tiles, so that others can’t steal them.
Perhaps coolest of all, Kamehameha Publishing is using sales of Hulo! to support [nupepa.org], where articles from Hawaiian newspapers are being archived in word-searchable online form.
Hulo!
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