What is the South American "satillo" in shape and use?

Chris Lozos
Chris Lozos Posts: 1,472
in Type Design Technique & Theory
I am adding the South American glyphs to a sans font and have never designed a satillo and am looking for advice from a native speaker.

Answers

  • Igor Freiberger
    Igor Freiberger Posts: 302
    edited February 17
    Not a native speaker here. Its name is "saltillo" (small jump) and it's used in Nahuan languages (mostly central Mexico) and also in Rapa Nui (Easter Island, only uppercase). My approach:


  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 1,030
    At last year’s Face/Interface conference, Mexican designer Manuel López Rocha spoke about designing for indigenous South American language communities. He touched on the importance of the saltillo. I don’t find the talk recorded online. But you can view an example of his work at https://cuatroojos.com.mx/lin-diseno-de-tipografia where you can at least find good examples to infer from.
  • Peter Constable
    Peter Constable Posts: 275
    For a bit of background info, see Proposal to Encode Additional Orthographic and Modifier Characters.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,617
    Igor’s uppercase form look pretty good to me, but I don’t recall ever seeing the saltillo aligned to the x-height like that.

    Here are the Brill forms, including smallcap:

  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,472
    Thank you all, this helps! It appears to me then that the mark's shape follows the top part of the exclamation but is shorter? Does anyone have a link to some text with it in use that I can test with? Any glyphs it is commonly used between?
  • Igor Freiberger
    Igor Freiberger Posts: 302
    edited February 17
    @John Hudson Thank you very much, my lowercase position is wrong.
    @Chris Lozos In the proposal to add saltillo to Unicode, there are two sample texts (pages 5-6).
  • Kent Lew
    Kent Lew Posts: 1,030
    Also, on Miguel’s site that I linked there are some examples of real text. But you’ll have to transcribe them, as they are in images. 
    Be sure to test between paired vowels-with-dieresis — e.g., nꞌanäꞌänëꞌn or xꞌëskojnëꞌëkt.



  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,472
    That helps greatly, Kent!
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,472
    Here is what I did with it so far:
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,617
    I think it makes sense for the cap version to align with the tops of the other capital letters.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,472
    edited February 18
    I was just going by this, John:

  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,472
    I was just going by this comment, John.


  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,617
    Hmm. I think I missed that aspect of the encoding proposal back when designing Brill.

    The raised form looks less good, I think, when the all-caps have been properly letterspaced. I can sort of see the legibility benefit when the caps are tightly spaced, though.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,472
    To me, it is a feel thing. I am a drummer so it is like hitting the bass drum every other beat but with a thump. Maybe I need to play Salsa music while I design type. Is not the glottal utterance an accent? The more raised form of the Saltillo makes it an accent, to me.
  • John Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,617
    edited February 19
    Is not the glottal utterance an accent?
    No, its just another consonant sound. Some writing systems have a letter for it.
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 19
    Is not the glottal utterance an accent?

    It's the sound you can "hear" in the English "uh-oh", or in German before every word (and morpheme) that starts with a vowel. It's the slight crack/interruption between the two vowel segments. It's called a glottal stop. While it is not pertinent in English to understand a word, in many languages, this sound is important to distinguish different words.

  • Erik
    Erik Posts: 5
    SCarewe said:

    It's called a glottal stop. While it is not pertinent in English to understand a word,
    Not entirely true.  Though generally not considered phonemic* in English (except perhaps in such edge‐case oddities as the uh‐oh you cited and the ʼm‑ʼmm that means “no”**), the glottal stop ([ʔ]) occurs frequently in English‐language speech and must be reckoned with (even if but subconsciously) for proficient comprehension.  As in German, itʼs often found at the beginning of words that phonemically begin with a vowel — it can serve as part of the contrast between a nice man and an [ʔ]⁠iceman — and it can even be inserted mid‐word, helping distinguish append from up⁠[ʔ]⁠end.  Furthermore, the glottal stop often replaces the phoneme /t/ after a vowel — details, like dialects, vary; but this phenomenon is often heard in words such as hit and spot (but perhaps not if you try to enunciate them to produce an example!).

    * A phoneme is an abstract conception of a speech sound, present in the mindʼs underlying representation of a word or phrase or morpheme.  A phoneme might in effect be essentially identical to its actual phonetic realization⁠, or phonological processes might transform it into a slightly different sound, a more dissimilar sound, a sequence of sounds, or even no sound at all; phonological processes might also move sounds around or insert additional ones.  The distinct speech sounds we produce and hear, irrespective of phonemic value, are phones.  To compare with computer font technology:  A phoneme is much like a Unicode code point, whereas a phone is much like a glyph.  (See, I managed to bring this back around to type!)

    ** Contrast ʼm‑ʼmm for “no” with ʼm‑hmm for “yes”.
  • SCarewe
    SCarewe Posts: 19
    Thanks for the extra detail! I didn't want to get too technical with the linguistic terminology. I was indeed referring to phonemic contrast.

    The minimal pair examples from English are interesting, thanks! t-glottalisation is of course a great example of the glottal stop in English, even though I assume it's still mostly an allophone in that case, though I admit I'm not very knowledgeable (nor, necessarily interested) in English phonology.
  • bdevos
    bdevos Posts: 7
    More examples of these characters are in the SIL Latin fonts https://software.sil.org/lcgfonts/download/ I am not saying that how SIL drew the characters is the only way to do it, rather, we in SIL are delighted that other fonts are including these characters.
  • Chris Lozos
    Chris Lozos Posts: 1,472
    @bdavos Thankyou for your help!

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