In Mexican linguistics, saltillo ( Spanish, 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 th ...

consonant ( IPA: ). 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 ...

. In a number of other

Nahuan languages The Nahuan or Aztecan languages are those languages of the 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 have changed this t ...

, 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 (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 ...

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 num ...

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 north ...

of Canada, Izere of Nigeria 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 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 th ...

. Examples are ''bowaꞌ'' 'mouth' as a consonant and ''nsꞌllan'' 'oil' as a vowel.Hamsaꞌ in Sinama
/ref>

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