- Saltillo (linguistics)
In Mexican linguistics, saltillo (Spanish, meaning "little skip") refers to a
glottal stop consonant (IPA2|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 anapostrophe , 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 manyAmerican 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 IPA| [ˈtɬeko] "in a fire" and IPA| [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 [http://unicode.org/versions/beta.html| Unicode 5.1] (released 4 April 2008), namely ( unicode|Ꞌ, ꞌ 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 unicode|ʼ U+02BC, MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE.ee also
*
Glottal stop (letter)
*Hamza
*Okina External links
*es icon [http://www.sil.org/mexico/ling/glosario/eDefnSaltillo.htm Definition of saltillo]
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