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B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled bee (pronounced /biː/), plural bees.1
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History
The letter B might have started as a pictogram of the floorplan of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet. By 1050 BC, the Phoenician alphabet's letter had a linear form that served as the beth.
| Egyptian hieroglyph cottage |
Proto-Canaanite house |
Phoenician 𐤁 beth |
Greek Β beta |
Etruscan 𐌁 B |
Latin B |
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Typography
The modern lowercase letter b derives from later Roman times, when scribes began omitting the upper loop of the capital.
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| Blackletter B | Uncial B | |
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| Modern Roman B | Modern Italic B | Modern Script B |
The letter B is often confused with the visually similar German ß which stands for ss.
Usage
In English and most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, the letter b denotes the voiced bilabial plosive (IPA: /b/), as in bib. In English it is sometimes silent, as in debt or comb (however the 'b' in 'comb' was actually pronounced at one time). In Estonian, Icelandic, and in Chinese transcription, B is not voiced, but is still contrasted to P, which is geminated /pp/ in Estonian and aspirated /pʰ/ in Chinese and Icelandic. In Fijian B is prenasalized IPA: [mb], whereas in Zulu and Xhosa it is implosive IPA: [ɓ], in contrast to the digraph Bh which represents IPA: [b].
Finnish uses the letter b only for loanwords.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA, letter /b/ denotes the voiced bilabial plosive. Variants of the letter b denote related bilabial consonants, like the voiced bilabial implosive and the bilabial trill. In X-SAMPA, capital B denotes the voiced bilabial fricative.
B is also a musical note.
Codes for computing
In Unicode the capital B is codepoint U+0042 and the lower case b is U+0062.
The ASCII code for capital B is 66 and for lowercase b is 98; or in binary 01000010 and 01100010, correspondingly.
The EBCDIC code for capital B is 194 and for lowercase b is 130.
The numeric character references in HTML and XML are "B" and "b" for upper and lower case respectively.
See also
- В, в : Ve (Cyrillic)
- Б, б: Be (Cyrillic)
- The Semitic letter Bet
- Ɓ
- B postcode area (United Kingdom)
References
- ^ "B" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "bee", op. cit.
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| Aa | Bb | Cc | Dd | Ee | Ff | Gg | Hh | Ii | Jj | Kk | Ll | Mm | Nn | Oo | Pp | Rr | Ss | Tt | Uu | Vv | Ww | Xx | Yy | Zz | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Letter B with diacritics
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters |
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Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 16 November 2008, at 21:11.
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