Saltillo (linguistics)
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In Mexican linguistics, saltillo (Spanish, meaning "little skip") refers to a glottal stop consonant (IPA: [ʔ]), or sometimes (particularly in Nahuatl) a voiceless glottal fricative (IPA: [h]).
The saltillo is a phoneme in some languages, and its presence or absence can change the meaning of a word. However, there is no saltillo in 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] or [ˈtɬehko] "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. It is often provisionally substituted for by such letters as ʼ U+02BC, MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- (Spanish) Definition of saltillo
