Cuatrillo (capital: Ꜭ, small: ꜭ) ( Spanish for "little four") is a letter of several colonial Mayan alphabets in the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

that is based on the digit 4. It was invented by a

Franciscan The Franciscans are a group of related organizations in the Catholic Church, founded or inspired by the Italian saint Francis of Assisi. They include three independent Religious institute, religious orders for men (the Order of Friars Minor bei ...

friar, Alonso de la Parra, in the 16th century to represent the

velar ejective The velar ejective is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . Features Features of the velar ejective: Occurrence See also * List of ...

consonant found in

Mayan languages The Mayan languages In linguistics, it is conventional to use ''Mayan'' when referring to the languages, or an aspect of a language. In other academic fields, ''Maya'' is the preferred usage, serving as both a singular and plural noun, and a ...

, and is known as one of the Parra letters. A derivative of the cuatrillo by adding a diacritic, , was used for the

alveolar ejective affricate The alveolar ejective affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . Features Features of the alveolar ejective affricate: Occur ...

found in the same languages. The cuatrillo is encoded in Unicode at the code points and , respectively. The cuatrillo-commas are at and . As an example of use, the letter appears when spelling the name of the

Kʼicheʼ language Kʼicheʼ ( ; natively , also known as among its speakers), or Quiché, is a Mayan language spoken by the Kʼicheʼ people of the central highlands in Guatemala and Mexico. With over a million speakers (some 7% of Guatemala's population), Kʼi ...

in the Parra orthography: .

References

External links

Cuatrillo and Tresillo in Recent Linguistic PublicationsN3028: Proposal to add Mayanist Latin letters to the UCS
4 Cuatrillo Mayan languages {{Mayan-lang-stub