Beta (letter)

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Beta (letter)

Beta (uppercase ?, lowercase ß, internal ; [] Vita) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
. In the system of Greek numerals

Greek numerals

Greek numerals are a numeral system using letters of the Greek alphabet. They are also known by the names Milesian numerals, Alexandrian numerals, or alphabetic numerals....
it has a value of 2. It was derived from the Phoenician letter

Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician language, a Northern Semitic languages language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia....
Beth . Letters that arose from Beta include the Roman B

For technical reasons, B# redirects here. For the musical note, see C B is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled bee , plural bees....
and the Cyrillic letters ?

Be (Cyrillic)

eading=Cyrillic letter Be|Image=...
and ?

Ve (Cyrillic)

eading=Cyrillic letter Ve|Image=...
.

In high-quality print, a variant of the letter is sometimes used that does not have a descender

Descender

In typography, a descender is the portion of a grapheme in a Latin alphabet that extends below the Baseline of a typeface.For example, in the letter y, the descender would be the "tail," or that portion of the diagonal line which lies below the v created by the two lines converging....
except at the beginning of a word: “ß?ß???” is written “ß????”.

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Encyclopedia

Beta (uppercase ?, lowercase ß, internal ; [] Vita) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
. In the system of Greek numerals

Greek numerals

Phoenician alphabet

. Letters that arose from Beta include the Roman B

Be (Cyrillic)

eading=Cyrillic letter Be|Image=...
and ?

Ve (Cyrillic)

eading=Cyrillic letter Ve|Image=...
.

In high-quality print, a variant of the letter is sometimes used that does not have a descender

Descender

Ancient Greek

In Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic Greece , Classical Greece , and Hellenistic civilization periods of ancient Greece and the classical antiquity....
, Beta represented a and the name of the letter, , was pronounced something like . The name of the letter in English derives from this; the American pronunciation is , whereas the British pronunciation is . See: American and British English pronunciation differences

American and British English pronunciation differences

Differences in pronunciation between American English and British English can be divided into:* differences in accent . Accents vary widely within AmE and within BrE, so the features considered here are mainly differences between General American and British Received Pronunciation ; for information about other accents see regional accents of...
.

Modern Greek

In Modern Greek

Greek language

Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
, it represents a voiced labiodental fricative

Voiced labiodental fricative

The voiced labiodental fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is v....
and the Modern Greek name of the letter, ??ta, is pronounced .

Use as a symbol or name

Beta is often used to denote a variable in mathematics and physics, where it often has specific meanings for certain applications, such as representing beta particles, and beta radiation.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet

International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic....
, Greek minuscule beta denotes a voiced bilabial fricative

Voiced bilabial fricative

The voiced bilabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some Speech communication languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is B....
.

Common difficulties

In typesetting technical literature, it is a commonly made mistake to use the German letter ß

The letter ? is a letter in the German alphabet. Its German language name is Eszett or scharfes S , and is pronounced as an unvoiced s ....
as a replacement for the ß. The two letters resemble each other superficially, but they are unrelated. This substitution looks extremely unprofessional to the eyes of German or Greek readers.

The Unicode number for ß is U+03B2, and with β or β the ß is coded in HTML.