Cuatrillo (capital: Ꜭ, small: ꜭ) (

Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...

for "little four") is a letter of several

colonial Mayan alphabet 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 ...

s 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 Alonso is a Spanish name of Germanic origin that is a Castilian variant of ''Adalfuns''. The original Visigothic name ''Alfonso'' suffered the phonetic change of the phoneme /f/ into the mute /h/ in the Early Middle Ages (around 9th Century), w ...

, 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 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 ...

. 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