In Mexican linguistics, the saltillo ( Spanish, meaning "little skip") is a

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

consonant ( IPA: ). The name was given by the early grammarians of

Classical Nahuatl Classical Nahuatl, also known simply as Aztec or Codical Nahuatl (if it refers to the variants employed in the Mesoamerican Codices through the medium of Aztec Hieroglyphs) and Colonial Nahuatl (if written in Post-conquest documents in the Lat ...

. In a number of other

Nahuan languages The Nahuan or Aztecan languages are those languages of the Uto-Aztecan languages, Uto-Aztecan language family that have undergone a sound change, known as Whorf's law, that changed an original *t to before *a. Subsequently, some Nahuan languages ...

, the sound cognate to the glottal stop of Classical Nahuatl is , and the term ''saltillo'' is applied to it for historical reasons. The saltillo, in both capital and small letter versions, appears in Unicode (in the Latin Extended-D block), but is often written with an apostrophe; it is sometimes written (for either pronunciation), or when pronounced . The spelling of the glottal stop with an apostrophe-like character most likely originates from transliterations of the Arabic

hamza The hamza ( ') () is an Arabic script character that, in the Arabic alphabet, denotes a glottal stop and, in non-Arabic languages, indicates a diphthong, vowel, or other features, depending on the language. Derived from the letter '' ʿayn'' ( ...

. It has also been written with a grave accent over the preceding vowel in some Nahuatl works, following

Horacio Carochi Horacio Carochi (1586–1666) was a Jesuit priest and grammarian who was born in Florence and died in New Spain. He is known for his grammar of the Classical Nahuatl language. Life Carochi was born in Florence as Horazio Carocci. He went to Ro ...

(1645). A glottal stop exists as a

phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...

in many other

indigenous languages of the Americas The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while many more are now e ...

and its presence or absence can distinguish words. However, there is no glottal stop in Standard Spanish, so the sound is often imperceptible to Spanish speakers, and Spanish writers usually did not write it when transcribing Mexican languages: Nahuatl "in a fire" and "he ascends" were both typically written , for example. Where glottal stop is distinguished, the latter may be written or .

The saltillo letter

Although in Spanish the word refers to the sound made by the glottal stop, it is often applied to the letter used to write that sound, especially the straight apostrophe, and this is the usual meaning of ''saltillo'' in English. The alphabet of the

Tlapanec language Tlapanec , or Mephaa, is an indigenous Mexican language spoken by more than 98,000 Tlapanec people in the state of Guerrero. Like other Oto-Manguean languages, it is tonal and has complex inflectional morphology. The ethnic group themselves ref ...

(Me̱ꞌpha̱a̱) uses both uppercase and lowercase saltillos, . Other languages, such as

Rapa Nui Easter Island (, ; , ) is an island and special territory of Chile in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. The island is renowned for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, ...

, use only a lowercase saltillo, with the first vowel capitalized when a word begins with a glottal stop. Unicode support of the cased forms began with Unicode 5.1, with and . Both are typically rendered with a straight apostrophe-like shape sometimes described as a ''dotless exclamation point''. Typesetters who are unfamiliar with Unicode frequently use an apostrophe instead, but that can cause problems in electronic files because the apostrophe is a punctuation mark, not a word-building character, and the ambiguous use of apostrophe for two different functions can make automated processing of the text difficult. The lowercase saltillo letter is used in

Miꞌkmaq The Mi'kmaq (also ''Mi'gmaq'', ''Lnu'', ''Mi'kmaw'' or ''Mi'gmaw''; ; , and formerly Micmac) are an Indigenous group of people of the Northeastern Woodlands, native to the areas of Canada's Atlantic Provinces, primarily Nova Scotia, New Bru ...

of Canada, Izere of Nigeria,

of Chile and in at least one Southeast Asian language, Central Sinama of the Philippines and Malaysia. In the latter it represents both the glottal stop and the centralized vowel and derives from the historical use of

for those sounds in

Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic (Arabic alphabet) and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script), the second-most widel ...

. Examples are ''bowaꞌ'' 'mouth' as a consonant and ''nsꞌllan'' 'oil' as a vowel.

References

External links

Definition of saltillo
{{Latin script Glottal consonants Languages of Mexico Latin-script letters Plosives

The saltillo letter

See also

References

External links