Ve (Cyrillic)

Ve (В в; italics: В в) is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

It commonly represents the voiced labiodental fricative /v/, like the pronunciation of ⟨v⟩ in "very".

The capital letter Ve is shaped exactly like the capital Latin letter B but is pronounced differently.

Ve is usually romanized using the Latin letter V, but sometimes using the Latin letter W.

History

Ve and the Cyrillic letter Be (Б б) were both derived from the Greek letter Beta (Β β), which already represented /v/ in Greek by the time the Cyrillic alphabet was created.

In the Early Cyrillic alphabet its name was вѣдѣ (vědě), meaning "I know".

In the Cyrillic numeral system, Ve had the value of 2.

Usage

In Russian and Bulgarian, Ve generally represents /v/, but at the end of a word or before voiceless consonants it represents the voiceless [f] and before a palatalizing vowel it represents /vʲ/.

In standard Ukrainian pronunciation (based on the Poltava dialect), Ve represents a sound like the English W ([w]) when in the word final position. Because of this, it is not uncommon to see words ending in ⟨в⟩ transcribed to end in ⟨w⟩, for example, Владислав = Vladyslaw for Vladislav.

Additionally, some Ukrainians also use such pronunciation in words where the letter is directly preceded by a consonant, while for others all occurrences of the letter Ve denote [w]. In Eastern Ukraine, the letter Ve may represent a voiceless [f], but this is considered a Russification, as word-final devoicing does not occur in standard Ukrainian. For example, the standard Ukrainian pronunciation of the word сказав (being said) is /skazaw/. However in Eastern Ukraine one is likely to hear the Russified [skazaf] (with final devoicing).

In Belarusian, the letter Ve represents only the sound /v/. In the word final position, or if directly proceeded by a consonant, it mutates to the letter Short U (Ў ў), a Belarusian letter representing the sound /w/. E.g., the Belarusian noun "language" is мова (mova), but the adjectival form is моўны (mowny), and the genitive plural of the noun (formed by removing the final ⟨а⟩) is моў (mow).

In Serbian, the letter Ve represents only the sound /v/.

Related letters and other similar characters

• Β β : Greek letter Beta
• Б б : Cyrillic letter Be
• B b : Latin letter B
• V v : Latin letter V
• W w : Latin letter W

Computing codes

character	В		в
Unicode name	CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER VE		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER VE
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	1042	0412	1074	0432
UTF-8	208 146	D0 92	208 178	D0 B2
Numeric character reference	В	В	в	в
KOI8-R and KOI8-U	247	F7	215	D7
CP 855	236	EC	235	EB
Windows-1251	194	C2	226	E2
ISO-8859-5	178	B2	210	D2
Mac Cyrillic	130	82	226	E2

External links

• The Wiktionary entry for В
• The Wiktionary entry for в