Saltillo (linguistics)

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In Mexican linguistics, saltillo (Spanish, meaning "little skip") refers to a glottal stop consonant (IPA: [ʔ]). It was given that name by the early grammarians of Classical Nahuatl. In a number of other Nahuatl languages, the sound cognate to Classical Nahuatl’s saltillo is IPA [h], and the term is applied to either pronunciation. The saltillo is often spelled with an apostrophe, though it is sometimes spelled (with either pronunciation) h, or, when pronounced as IPA [h], j. In some Nahuatl works, following Carochi 1645, it has been spelled with a grave accent over the preceding vowel.

The saltillo is a phoneme in many American languages besides Nahuatl, which means that its presence or absence can change the meaning of a word. However, there is no saltillo in standard Spanish, so the sound is often imperceptible to Spanish speakers, and Spanish writers usually did not write it when transcribing Mexican languages. This meant that, for example, Nahuatl [tɬeko] "in a fire" and [ˈtɬeʔko] "he ascends" were both written tleco.

Saltillo can also refer to a straight apostrophe-like symbol, sometimes described as a dotless exclamation point, that is sometimes used to represent the sound. This letter corresponds to two code points in Unicode 5.1 (released 4 April 2008), namely ʼ U+A78B LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SALTILLO and U+A78C LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO. It has in the past often been provisionally substituted for by such letters as ʼ U+02BC, MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE.

[edit] See also

• Glottal stop (letter)
• Hamza
• Okina

[edit] External links

• (Spanish) Definition of saltillo

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters