Posted 06 August 2010 - 01:56 PM
hehe.. Boy George?
Ok seriously here's the low-down on B
per lovely wikipedia.orgIn English and most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, ‹b› denotes the voiced bilabial plosive /b/, as in bib. In English it is sometimes silent; most instances are derived from old monosyllablic words with the b final and immediately preceded by an m, such as lamb and bomb; a few are examples of etymological spelling to make the word more like its Latin original, such as debt or doubt. In Estonian, Icelandic, and in Chinese, ‹b› does not denote a voiced consonant; instead, it represents a voiceless /p/ that contrasts with either a geminated /pp/ (in Estonian) or an aspirated /pʰ/ (in Chinese, 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/.
