InMexican linguistics, thesaltillo (Spanish, meaning "little skip") is aglottal stop consonant (IPA:[ʔ]). The name was given by the early grammarians ofClassical Nahuatl. In a number of otherNahuan languages, the sound cognate to the glottal stop of Classical Nahuatl is[h], and the termsaltillo is applied to it for historical reasons. The saltillo, in both capital and small letter versions, appears in Unicode (inthe Latin Extended-D block), but is often written with an apostrophe; it is sometimes written⟨h⟩ (for either pronunciation), or⟨j⟩ when pronounced[h]. The spelling of the glottal stop with an apostrophe-like character most likely originates from transliterations of the Arabichamza. It has also been written with a grave accent over the preceding vowel in some Nahuatl works, followingHoracio Carochi (1645).
A glottal stop exists as aphoneme in many otherindigenous 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 writtentleco, for example. Where glottal stop is distinguished, the latter may be writtentlehco ortleꞌko.
Although in Spanish the wordsaltillo 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 ofsaltillo in English. The alphabet of theTlapanec language (Me̱ꞌpha̱a̱) uses both uppercase and lowercase saltillos,⟨Ꞌ ꞌ⟩. Other languages, such asRapa 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] withU+A78B ꞋLATIN CAPITAL LETTER SALTILLO andU+A78C ꞌLATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO. Both are typically rendered with a straight apostrophe-like shape sometimes described as adotless 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 inMiꞌkmaq of Canada,Izere of Nigeria,Rapa Nui of Chile[citation needed] 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[ə] and derives from the historical use ofhamza for those sounds inArabic script. Examples arebowaꞌ 'mouth' as a consonant andnsꞌllan 'oil' as a vowel.[2]