- published: 08 Jan 2015
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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.
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.
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).
The Cyrillic script ( /sɨˈrɪlɪk/) or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School. It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, past and present, in Eastern Europe and Asia, especially those of Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011 around 252 million people in Europe and Asia use it as official alphabet for their national languages. About half of them are in Russia.
Cyrillic is derived from the Greek uncial script, augmented by ligatures and consonants from the older Glagolitic alphabet and Old Bulgarian for sounds not found in Ancient Greek. It is named in honor of the two Eastern Roman Empire brothers, Saints Cyril and Methodius, who created the Glagolitic alphabet earlier on. Modern scholars believe that Cyrillic was developed and formalized by early disciples of Cyril and Methodius (such as Clement of Ohrid).
With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek scripts.