Be (Cyrillic)
Be (Б б б italics: Б 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 Б (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/буки), 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 Russian small letter б (be) is similar in shape to the digit 6. In the Serbian and Macedonian alphabet, the lowercase letter б has a different printed form as shown in the illustration which shows both the standard and variant form — it must not look to digit 6.
In Web technologies, <span lang="sr">б</span>
and
<span lang="ru">б</span>
must give different results. Since Unicode still doesn't provide the required difference, OpenType locl
(locale) support must be present. Programs like Mozzila Firefox, LibreOffice (currently under GNU/Linux only), and some rare others, provide required OpenType support. Starting from CSS 3, web authors also have to use this: font-feature-settings: 'locl';
. Of course, font families like GNU FreeFont, DejaVu, Ubuntu, Microsoft "C*" fonts from Windows Vista and above must be used.
The cursive form of the lowercase letter Be may look like the lowercase Greek letter Delta (δ), but not exactly the same, design must be just slightly altered (the upper part).
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 then 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
Preview | Б | б | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
Unicode name | CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER BE | CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER BE | ||
Encodings | decimal | hex | dec | hex |
Unicode | 1041 | U+0411 | 1073 | U+0431 |
UTF-8 | 208 145 | D0 91 | 208 177 | D0 B1 |
Numeric character reference | Б |
Б |
б |
б |
Named character reference | 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 |