In
Mexican linguistics, saltillo (
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 Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
, meaning "little skip") is the word for a
glottal stop
The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...
consonant (
IPA
IPA commonly refers to:
* India pale ale, a style of beer
* International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation
* Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound
IPA may also refer to:
Organizations International
* Insolvency Practitioners ...
: ). The name was given by the early grammarians of
Classical Nahuatl
Classical Nahuatl (also known simply as Aztec or Nahuatl) is any of the variants of Nahuatl spoken in the Valley of Mexico and central Mexico as a ''lingua franca'' at the time of the 16th-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. During the s ...
. 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 Voiceless alveolar lateral affricate, before * ...
, 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
Hamza ( ar, همزة ') () is a letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop . Hamza is not one of the 28 "full" letters and owes its existence to historical inconsistencies in the standard writing system. It is derived from ...
. 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. He went to Rome where he entered ...
(1645).
A glottal stop exists as a
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
in many other
indigenous languages of the Americas
Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large numbe ...
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 basic meaning of the word 'saltillo' is the sound, it is often applied to the letter used to write that sound, especially the straight apostrophe, and this is the usual meaning in English. The alphabet of the
Tlapanec language
Tlapanec , or Meꞌphaa, 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 ...
(Me̱ꞌpha̱a̱) uses both uppercase and lowercase saltillos, . Other languages, such as
Rapa Nui
Easter Island ( rap, Rapa Nui; es, Isla de Pascua) 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 most famous for its nearly ...
, 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'', ''Miꞌkmaw'' or ''Miꞌgmaw''; ; ) are a First Nations people of the Northeastern Woodlands, indigenous to the areas of Canada's Atlantic Provinces and the Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec as well as the nort ...
of Canada,
Izere of Nigeria and in at least one Southeast Asian language,
Central Sinama
Central is an adjective usually referring to being in the center of some place or (mathematical) object.
Central may also refer to:
Directions and generalised locations
* Central Africa, a region in the centre of Africa continent, also known as ...
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
hamza
Hamza ( ar, همزة ') () is a letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop . Hamza is not one of the 28 "full" letters and owes its existence to historical inconsistencies in the standard writing system. It is derived from ...
for those sounds in
Arabic script
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and the ...
. Examples are ''bowaꞌ'' 'mouth' as a consonant and ''nsꞌllan'' 'oil' as a vowel.
Hamsaꞌ in Sinama
/ref>
See also
*Glottal stop (letter)
The character , called glottal stop, is an alphabetic letter in some Latin alphabets, most notably in several languages of Canada where it indicates a glottal stop sound. Such usage derives from phonetic transcription, for example the Inter ...
*Hamza
Hamza ( ar, همزة ') () is a letter in the Arabic alphabet, representing the glottal stop . Hamza is not one of the 28 "full" letters and owes its existence to historical inconsistencies in the standard writing system. It is derived from ...
* ʻOkina
References
External links
Definition of saltillo
{{Latin script
Glottal consonants
Languages of Mexico
Latin-script letters
Plosives