Saltillo (linguistics)
In
A glottal stop exists as a phoneme in many other indigenous languages of the Americas 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 [ˈtɬeko] "in a fire" and [ˈtɬeʔko] "he ascends" were both typically written tleco, for example. Where glottal stop is distinguished, the latter may be written tlehko or tleꞌko.
The saltillo letter
Although in Spanish the basic meaning of the word 'saltillo' refers to the sound made by the glottal stop, it is often applied to the letter used to write that sound, especially the straight apostrophe, and this is the usual meaning of 'saltillo' in English. The alphabet of the Tlapanec language (Me̱ꞌpha̱a̱) uses both uppercase and lowercase saltillos, ⟨Ꞌ ꞌ⟩. Other languages, such as Rapa Nui, 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,[1] with U+A78B Ꞌ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SALTILLO and U+A78C ꞌ LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO. 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
See also
References
- ^ Unicode block Latin Extended-D
- ^ "The Central Sinama Alphabet". Kauman Sama Online. 2009-12-09. Retrieved 2023-07-11.
External links
- (in Spanish) Definition of saltillo