B, or b, is the second letter of the Latin alphabet. Its English name is a bee (pronounced / ˈbiː /), plural of bees. It is a pronounced two-way stop in many languages, including English. In some other languages, ​​it is used to represent other bilabial consonants.

Old English was originally written in runes, whose equivalent letter was beorc ⟨ᛒ⟩, meaning “birch.” Beorc at least from Elder Futhark of the 2nd-century, which is believed to have originated from the Old Italic alphabet “⟨?⟩ either directly or through the Latin ⟨B.”

Uncial ⟨B⟩ and semi-uncial ⟨b⟩, introduced by the Gregorian and Irish missions, gradually became Insular’s “ularb” scripts. These Old English Latin alphabets replaced the earlier runes, the use of which was completely banned during the reign of King Canute in the early 11th century. The Norman Conquest popularised the Carolingian half-uncial forms, which then developed into blackletters ⟨b⟩. Around 1300, the letters became more and more distinct, with uppercase and lowercase letters B having separate meanings. After the advent of the press in the 15th century, the Holy Roman Empire (Germany) and Scandinavia continued to use forms of blackletter (particularly Fraktur), while eventually, England adopted the humanist and antiqua letters developed in Renaissance Italy from a combination of Roman and Carolingian inscriptions. Texts.

The Roman ⟨B⟩ originated from the Greek capital beta ⟨Β⟩ through the Etruscan and Cumaean variants. The Greek letter was an adaptation of the Phoenician letter bēt ⟨?⟩. The Egyptian hieroglyph for the consonant / b / was an image of a foot and a calf ⟨B⟩, but bēt (Phoenician for “house”) is a modified form of the Proto-Sinai glyph ⟩Bet⟩, probably adapted from the individual hieroglyph Pr ⟨Per⟩, meaning ” house. « The Hebrew letter beth ⟨ב⟩ is a separate development of the Phoenician letter.

In Byzantine times, the Greek letter ⟨Β⟩ began to be pronounced / v /, so that in modern Greek, it is known as víta (still written βήτα). The Cyrillic letter ve В⟩ represents the same sound, so it developed a modified form known as ⟨Б⟩ to represent the Slavic languages’ / b /. (Modern Greek continues to lack the letter expressed bilabial plosive and transliterates such sounds from other languages ​​using the digraph/consonant group ⟨μπ⟩, vol.

Use in writing systems.

English

In English, ⟨b⟩ means the voiced bilabial stop / b /, as in the case of a bib. In English, it is sometimes silent. This is especially true for words ending in ⟨mb⟨, such as lamb and bomb, some of which originally had the sound / b /, while some added the letter ⟨b⟩ by analogy (see Phonological history of English Groups). ⟨B⟨ in debt, doubt, fine and new words are added present 16th century as an etymological spelling, aiming to make the words more similar to their Latin originals (debitum, dubito, subtilis).

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