B Lp NBO

B, or b, is the second letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''bee'' (pronounced ), plural ''bees''.

It represents the voiced bilabial stop in many languages, including English. In some other languages, it is used to represent other bilabial consonants.

History

The Roman derived from the Greek alphabet, Greek capital beta (letter), beta via its Old Italic script, Etruscan and Archaic Greek alphabets#Euboean, Cumaean variants. The Greek letter was an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, Phoenician letter bet (letter), bēt . The Ancient Egypt, Egyptian Egyptian hieroglyphs, hieroglyph for the consonant voiced bilabial plosive, /b/ had been an image of a foot (hieroglyph), foot and calf , but bēt (Phoenician for "house") was a modified form of a Proto-Sinaitic script, Proto-Sinaitic glyph adapted from the separate Pr (hieroglyph), hieroglyph Pr meaning "house". The Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew letter bet (letter), bet is a separate development of the Phoenician letter.

By Byzantine Greek, Byzantine times, the Greek letter came to be pronounced voiced labiodental fricative, /v/, so that it is known in modern Greek as ''víta'' (still written ). The Cyrillic alphabet, Cyrillic letter ve (Cyrillic), ve represents the same sound, so a modified form known as be (Cyrillic), be was developed to represent the Slavic languages' voiced bilabial plosive, /b/. (Modern Greek continues to lack a letter for the voiced bilabial plosive and transliterates such sounds from other languages using the Digraph (orthography), digraph/consonant cluster , ''mp''.)

Old English was originally written in Anglo-Saxon runes, runes, whose equivalent letter was beorc , meaning "birch". Beorc dates to at least the 2nd-century Elder Futhark, which is now thought to have derived from the Old Italic alphabets' either directly or via Latin alphabet, Latin .

The Uncial script, uncial and half-uncial introduced by the Gregorian mission, Gregorian and Hiberno-Scottish mission, Irish missions gradually developed into the Insular scripts' . These Old English Latin alphabets supplanted the earlier runes, whose use was fully banned under King Canute in the early 11th century. The Norman Conquest of England, Norman Conquest popularised the Carolingian script, Carolingian half-uncial forms which latter developed into blackletter . Around 1300, letter case was increasingly distinguished, with capitalization, upper- and lower-case B taking separate meanings. Following the advent of Letterpress printing, printing in the 15th century, the Holy Roman Empire (Germany) and Scandinavia continued to use forms of blackletter (particularly Fraktur), while England eventually adopted the Humanist minuscule, humanist and Antiqua (typeface class), antiqua scripts developed in Renaissance Italy from a combination of Roman inscriptions and Carolingian texts. The present forms of the Cursive#English cursive, English cursive B were developed by the 17th century.

Use in writing systems

English

In English orthography, English, denotes the voiced bilabial stop , as in ''bib''. In English, it is sometimes silent letter, silent. This occurs particularly in words ending in , such as ''lamb'' and ''bomb'', some of which originally had a /b/ sound, while some had the letter added by analogy (see Phonological history of English consonant clusters#Plum-plumb merger and him-hymn merger, Phonological history of English consonant clusters). The in ''debt'', ''doubt'', ''subtle'', and related words was added in the 16th century as an etymology, etymological spelling, intended to make the words more like their Latin language, Latin originals (''debitum'', ''dubito'', ''subtilis'').

As /b/ is one of the sounds subject to Grimm's Law, words which have in English and other Germanic languages may find their cognates in other Indo-European languages appearing with , , or instead. For example, compare the various cognates of the word wikt:brother, ''brother''. It is the Letter frequency, seventh least frequently used letter in the English language (after V, K, J, X, Q, and Z), with a frequency of about 1.5% in words.

Other languages

Many other languages besides English use to represent a voiced bilabial stop.

In Estonian language, Estonian, Danish language, Danish, Faroese language, Faroese, Icelandic language, Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic and Mandarin Chinese Pinyin, does not denote a voiced consonant. Instead, it represents a voiceless that contrasts with either a geminated (in Estonian) or an aspiration (linguistics), aspirated (in Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Scottish Gaelic and Pinyin) represented by p, . In Fijian language, Fijian represents a prenasalized consonant, prenasalised , whereas in Zulu language, Zulu and Xhosa language, Xhosa it represents an implosive consonant, implosive , in contrast to the digraph (orthography), digraph which represents . Finnish language, Finnish uses only in loanwords.

Other systems

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, [b] is used to represent the voiced bilabial stop Phone (phonetics), phone. In phonological transcription systems for specific languages, /b/ may be used to represent a Voice (phonetics)#Voice and tenseness, lenis phoneme, not necessarily voiced, that contrasts with fortis /p/ (which may have greater aspiration, tenseness or duration).

Other uses

* In the base-16 numbering system, B is a number that corresponds to the number 11 in decimal (base 10) counting.
* B (musical note), B is a musical note. In English-speaking countries, it represents Si, the 12th note of a chromatic scale built on C (musical note), C. In Central Europe and Scandinavia, "B" is used to denote B♭ (musical note), B-flat and the 12th note of the chromatic scale is denoted "H". Archaic forms of 'b', the ''b quadratum'' (square b, ) and ''b rotundum'' (round b, ) are used in musical notation as the symbols for ''natural (music), natural'' and ''flat (music), flat'', respectively.
* In Contracted (grade 2) English braille, stands for "but" when in isolation.
* In computer science, B is the symbol for byte, a unit of information storage.
* In engineering, B is the symbol for decibel, bel, a unit of level (logarithmic quantity), level.
* In chemistry, B is the symbol for boron, a chemical element.

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

* 𐤁 : Phoenician alphabet, Semitic letter Bet (letter), Bet, from which the following symbols originally derive
* Β β : Greek alphabet, Greek letter Beta (letter), Beta, from which B derives
* Ⲃ ⲃ Coptic alphabet, Coptic letter Bēta, which derives from Greek Beta
* В в : Cyrillic letter Ve (Cyrillic), Ve, which also derives from Beta
* Б б : Cyrillic letter Be (Cyrillic), Be, which also derives from Beta
* ʙ : ʙ, A small capital B, used as the lowercase B in a number of alphabets during romanization
* 𐌁 : Old Italic script, Old Italic B, which derives from Greek Beta
* ᛒ : Runes, Runic letter Berkanan, which probably derives from Old Italic B
* 𐌱 : Gothic alphabet, Gothic letter bercna, which derives from Greek Beta
* International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA-specific symbols related to B: 𐞄 𐞅
* B with diacritics: Ƀ ƀ Dot (diacritic), Ḃ ḃ Ḅ ḅ Macron below, Ḇ ḇ Ɓ ɓ ᵬ ᶀ
* Ꞗ ꞗ : B with flourish
* ᴃ ᴯ ^{B b} : Barred B and various modifier letters are used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.
* Ƃ ƃ : Ƃ, B with topbar

Derived ligatures, abbreviations, signs and symbols

* ␢ :
* ฿ : Thai baht
* ₿ : Bitcoin
* ♭: The Flat (music), flat in music, mentioned above, still closely resembles lowercase b.

Other representations

Computing

The Latin letters and have Unicode encodings and . These are the same code points as those used in ASCII and ISO 8859. There are also precomposed character encodings for and with diacritics, for most of those listed #Related characters, above; the remainder are produced using combining diacritics.

Variant forms of the letter have unique code points for specialist use: the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols, alphanumeric symbols set in mathematics and science, Latin beta in linguistics, and halfwidth and fullwidth forms for legacy CJK characters, CJK font compatibility. The Cyrillic and Greek homoglyphs of the Latin have separate encodings: and .

Other

Notes

References

External links

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{{Latin script, B}

ISO basic Latin letters