B is the second letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is a bee, plural of bees.
The letter B was derived from the Phoenician letter Beth. The Semitic Bet had the value 2 in Ugaritic, but it became 6/12 (that is, 3+3) in Phoenician. The Etruscan and Greek alphabets, however, did not have the a /b/ sound—the corresponding Etruscan and Greek letters were beta and pi, respectively. Consequently, most early Latin-alphabet inscriptions have no b sound either; they use β instead or add a digraph such as bl to represent ββ. In later Vulgar Latin times there came to be more of a distinction between these two sounds; scholars believe that this led to some confusion about which consonant should be represented by which grapheme when transcribing foreign words into Latin script for phonetic reasons: etymologically native words kept their original spellings with ⟨c⟩ or ⟨g⟩ while loanwords spelled with ⟨b⟩ according to their pronunciation. This caused further differences in spelling when transliterating Ancient Greek words into Modern English because Classical pronunciation differed from Koine Greek: for example, phi became f rather than pʰ as would be expected if following Modern English rules.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives “bee” as the meaning of B in “bee”, quoting from a 16th-century source. The OED also records that B was used for various other purposes, including to represent measures (such as butter), certain musical instruments (such as bass viol and bodhran ), trees or other plants with cylindrical shapes ( such as a bay tree ), and even a type of cannon. In Old English, B could be used either on its own or with the following vowel to indicate that voiced stops were to be pronounced where voiceless stops would otherwise be expected; this function survives only partially in Modern Icelandic. This digraph was also occasionally used by Old Irish scribes to represent word-final /m/ before vowels which did not trigger lenition; see the Pronunciation section below for details.
In many languages, including Spanish, French, German, Lithuanian, Dutch, and Afrikaans, the letter has been adopted from Latin to represent native bilabial plosives (/b/ or /β/) which are not present in those languages’ indigenous alphabets. These uses often arose independently of Latin influence; for example, Modern Greek β comes from Phoenician bet but has no etymological connection with Classical Greek beta.
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) records that it was used to represent the voiced bilabial stop (/b/) by early Middle English scribes, but that by late Middle English, it had come to be used for the unvoiced bilabial fricative (/β/). The OED also records a use for /p/ in Late Middle English. These values are reflected in major modern dictionaries; however, some dialects of British and American English do retain /b/ for this sound (e.g., Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006: 685–686). In other fields, such as linguistics, its use may be extended to represent any voiced bilabial consonant.
B was a programming language developed at Bell Labs in the 1970s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. It was designed as a successor to the A programming language, which was also developed at Bell Labs. B was influenced by the ALGOL 58 and CPL programming languages.
B is considered to be one of the first high-level programming languages, as it allowed for more abstract thinking about programs than previous languages such as assembly language. B’s syntax is similar to that of C, another popular language developed at Bell Labs. However, B has only 32 keywords, while C has over 60 keywords.
B became popular for system development due to its compactness and speed. It was used extensively on Unix systems during the 1980s and 1990s. Today, however, its use has declined in favor of newer languages such as Java and Python.
The b note is the second note of the C major scale. It has a frequency of 246.94 Hz. The b note is also known as Si, Ti, or H in other musical systems.
The b note is used in a variety of genres including classical, jazz, and rock music. It can be played on a variety of instruments including piano, guitar, and saxophone. The b note can also be sung by both male and female vocalists.
The b note plays an important role in music theory and composition. It is often used to create tension or suspense in a piece of music. In tonal music, the b note usually resolves to the tonic (the first degree or root) when it functions as the leading tone (seventh degree).
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