B The second letter in all languages whose alphabets have a Phoenician origin, as Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian. In English, French, and German it is strictly a palato-labial, the sound being produced by compressing the air within the mouth, vocalizing it by the vibrations of the membranes forming the palate or roof of the mouth, the uvula at the same time closing the nasal orifices. The sound can be imperfectly formed and prolonged while the lips are tightly closed. The perfect sound is produced at the commencement of a syllable by a sudden opening of the lips for the passage of the vocalized breath; at the close of a syllable by suddenly closing the lips upon the vocalized current. It differs from P in that in sounding the latter the breath passes out without compression and vocalization. In Spanish, in later Latin and modern Greek, the prevalent sound of B is nearly identical with that of V, produced by pressing the upper teeth upon the lower lip, causing only a partial closure of the mouth, so that the sound can be indefinitely prolonged.

Thus in modern Greek (as perhaps in the ancient), is pronounced vasilefs, the v having its consonantal sound. The Greek B sometimes, though not always, represented the Latin V; thus Virgilius was written or

The Hebrew beth has the sound of V except when a diacritical point indicates that it is softened to B. In the passage of a word from one language to another an interchange not un-frequently takes place between B and P, F (ph), V, and less frequently M. For example: Lat. ab, Gr. Eng. off; Gr. Lat. mor[t]s.

In German, B, chiefly at the end of words, is often pronounced like P; thus, ab like ap. The sound of B, being formed with the mouth closed, is wanting in many of the dialects of the American Indians, who enunciate almost wholly with the lips open. - In the calendar B is the second dominical letter. In music it is the seventh degree of the diatonic scale of C, and the 12th of the diatonic-chromatic scale. According to the tempered system of tuning, the ratio of B to the fundamental note C is 8/15. In the ancient diatonic scale B was not used as a key-note, its fifth, F, being imperfect. In the German notation our B is called H, B flat, half a tone lower than B, being called B. As a numeral, β among the Greeks represented 2, and with a stroke beneath 2,000; among the Romans B was occasionally used to denote 300, and with a line above it 3,000.