Classical Nahuatl Grammar - Orthography Used in This Article

Orthography Used in This Article

Vowel length was phonologically distinctive in this language. Long vowels are indicated with a macron above the vowel letter: <ā, ē, ī, ō>. Saltillo (glottal stop consonant, ) is indicated with an /h/. The grammarian Horacio Carochi (1645) represented saltillo by marking diacritics on the preceding vowel: grave accent on nonfinal vowels <à, ì, è, ò> and circumflex on final vowels <â, î, ê, ô>. In the history of this language, both in its actual use and in the studies by all other colonial era grammarians other than Carochi, long vowels and the saltillo were rarely indicated. To give an adequate description of the classical Nahuatl language, it is, however, essential to mark them.