Be (Cyrillic)
Be (Б б; italics: Б б) is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiced bilabial plosive /b/, like the English pronunciation of ⟨b⟩ in "bee". It should not be confused with the Cyrillic letter Ve (В в), which is shaped like Latin capital letter B but represents the voiced labiodental fricative /v/.
The Cyrillic letter Be is romanized using the Latin letter B.
History
Both the Cyrillic letters Be and Ve (В в) were derived from the Greek letter Beta (Β β).
In the Early Cyrillic alphabet the name of the letter Be was бѹкы (buky), meaning "letter".
In the Cyrillic numeral system, the letter Be had no numeric value because the letter Ve inherited the Greek letter Beta's numeric value.
Form
The letter Be is similar in shape to the digit 6. In the Serbian/Macedonian alphabet, the lowercase letter Be has a different printed form as shown in the illustration which shows both the standard and variant form.
The cursive form of the lowercase letter Be may look like the lowercase Greek letter Delta (δ).
Usage
In Russian and Bulgarian, the letter Be generally represents the voiced bilabial plosive /b/, but word-finally or before a voiceless consonant it also represents the voiceless [p], and before a palatalizing vowel it represents /bʲ/. In Macedonian the letter represents the sound /b/, but if the letter is in the final position of the word than it is pronounced as /p/, like in леб /lɛp/ ('bread').
In the Mari it may represent either /b/ or the voiced bilabial fricative /β/.
Related letters and other similar characters
- Β β : Greek letter Beta
- В в : Cyrillic letter Ve
- B b : Latin letter B
Computing codes
character | Б | б | ||
Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER BE | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER BE | ||
character encoding | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
Unicode | 1041 | 0411 | 1073 | 0431 |
UTF-8 | 208 145 | D0 91 | 208 177 | D0 B1 |
Numeric character reference | Б | Б | б | б |
KOI8-R and KOI8-U | 226 | E2 | 194 | C2 |
CP 855 | 163 | A3 | 162 | A2 |
Windows-1251 | 193 | C1 | 225 | E1 |
ISO-8859-5 | 177 | B1 | 209 | D1 |
Mac Cyrillic | 129 | 81 | 225 | E1 |