B

This article is about the letter of the alphabet. For other uses, see B (disambiguation).

For technical reasons, "B#" redirects here. For B-sharp, see B♯.
ISO basic
Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd
Ee Ff Gg Hh
Ii Jj Kk Ll
Mm Nn Oo Pp
Qq Rr Ss Tt
Uu Vv Ww Xx
Yy Zz
Writing cursive forms of B

B or b (pronounced /ˈbiː/, bee)[1][2] is the 2nd letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet. It represents the voiced bilabial stop in many languages, including English. In some other languages, it is used to represent other bilabial consonants.

History

Egyptian
Pr		 Phoenician 
bēt		 Greek
beta		 Etruscan
B		 Roman
B		 Runic
beorc		 Uncial
B		 Insular
B		 Blackletter
B		 Antiqua
B		 Modern Roman
B

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

The uncial ⟨⟩ and half-uncial ⟨⟩ introduced by the Gregorian and 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 popularized the Carolingian half-uncial forms which latter developed into blackletter ⟨  ⟩. Around 1300, letter case was increasingly distinguished, with upper- and lower-case B taking separate meanings. Following the advent of printing in the 15th century, Germany and Scandinavia continued to use forms of blackletter (particularly Fraktur), while England eventually adopted the humanist and antiqua scripts developed in Renaissance Italy from a combination of Roman inscriptions and Carolingian texts. The present forms of the English cursive B were developed by the 17th century.

The Roman ⟨B⟩ derived from the Greek capital beta ⟨Β⟩ via its Etruscan and Cumaean variants. The Greek letter was an adaptation of the Phoenician letter bēt ⟨𐤁⟩.[3] The Egyptian hieroglyph for the consonant /b/ had been an image of a foot and calf ⟨  ⟩,[4] but bēt (Phoenician for "house") was a modified form of a Proto-Sinaitic glyph ⟨  ⟩ probably adapted from the separate hieroglyph Pr ⟨ ⟩ meaning "house".[5][n 1] The Hebrew letter beth ⟨ב⟩ is a separate development of the Phoenician letter.[3]

By Byzantine times, the Greek letter ⟨Β⟩ came to be pronounced /v/,[3] so that it is known in modern Greek as víta (still written βήτα). The Cyrillic letter ve ⟨В⟩ represents the same sound, so a modified form known as be ⟨Б⟩ was developed to represent the Slavic languages' /b/.[3] (Modern Greek continues to lack a letter for the voiced bilabial plosive and transliterates such sounds from other languages using the digraph/consonant cluster ⟨μπ⟩, mp.)

Use in writing systems

English

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

As /b/ is one of the sounds subject to Grimm's Law, words which have ⟨b⟩ in English and other Germanic languages may find their cognates in other Indo-European languages appearing with ⟨bh⟩, ⟨p⟩, ⟨f⟩ or ⟨φ⟩ instead.[3] For example, compare the various cognates of the word brother.

Other languages

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

In Estonian, Icelandic, and Chinese Pinyin, ⟨b⟩ does not denote a voiced consonant. Instead, it represents a voiceless /p/ that contrasts with either a geminated /p:/ (in Estonian) or an aspirated /pʰ/ (in Pinyin, Danish and Icelandic) represented by ⟨p⟩. In Fijian ⟨b⟩ represents a prenasalized /mb/, whereas in Zulu and Xhosa it represents an implosive /ɓ/, in contrast to the digraph ⟨bh⟩ which represents /b/. Finnish uses ⟨b⟩ only in loanwords.

Phonetic transcription

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

Other uses

Main article: B (disambiguation)

B is also a musical note. In English-speaking countries, it represents Si, the 12th note of a chromatic scale built on C. In Central Europe and Scandinavia, "B" is used to denote 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 and flat, respectively.

In Contracted (grade 2) English braille, 'b' stands for "but" when in isolation.

Related characters

Ancestors, descendants and siblings

Derived ligatures, abbreviations, signs and symbols

Computing codes

Character B b
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B   LATIN SMALL LETTER B
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 66 U+0042 98 U+0062
UTF-8 66 42 98 62
Numeric character reference B B b b
EBCDIC family 194 C2 130 82
ASCII 1 66 42 98 62
1 Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

Notes

  1. ↑ It also resembles the hieroglyph for /h/ ⟨  ⟩ meaning "manor" or "reed shelter".

References

Citations

  1. ↑ "B", Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
  2. ↑ "B", Merriam-Webster's 3rd New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, 1993.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 EB (1878).
  4. ↑ Schumann-Antelme, Ruth; et al. (1998), Illustrated Hieroglyphics Handbook, English translation by Sterling Publishing (2002), pp. 22–23, ISBN 1-4027-0025-3.
  5. ↑ Goldwasser, Orly (Mar–Apr 2010), "How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs", Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 36 (No. 1), Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, ISSN 0098-9444, retrieved 6 Nov 2011.

Bibliography

External links

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