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/.
Contents
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 (but not identical) in shape to the digit 6. In the Serbian and Macedonian alphabets, the lowercase letter б has a different form used in printing, as is shown in the illustration to the side, which shows both the standard and variant forms. Its lowercase from also somewhat resembles a lowercase letter B ("b"), the letter to which it corresponds in the Latin alphabet. After all, lowercase letter B ("b") developed from scribal alterations to the capital letter B ("B"), just as б did from scribal alterations to the capital letter В.
On the World Wide Web, <span lang="sr">б</span> and <span lang="ru">б</span> must give different results. Since Unicode does not provide the required difference, OpenType locl (locale) support must be present. Programs like Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice (currently under Linux only), as well as a few others, provide the 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 resembles the lowercase Greek letter Delta (δ), but they are slightly different in their upper portions.
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]. Before a palatalizing vowel, it represents /bʲ/. In Macedonian, the letter represents the sound /b/, but it is in the final position of the word, it is pronounced as /p/, like in леб /lɛp/ ('bread').
In Mari, it may represent either /b/ or the voiced bilabial fricative /β/.