|This article does not cite any references or sources. (February 2007)|
|Cyrillic letter Be|
|The Cyrillic script|
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.
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.
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 which it corresponds to in the Latin alphabet. This resemblance is far from coincidental, as 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.
In Web technologies,
<span lang="sr">б</span> and
<span lang="ru">б</span> must give different results. Since Unicode doesn't provide the required difference, OpenType
locl (locale) support must be present. Programs like Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice (currently under GNU/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), though they are slightly different in their upper portions.
Pronunciation of name of Cyrillic 'Б'
|Problems playing this file? See media help.|
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').
Related letters and other similar characters
|Unicode name||CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER BE||CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER BE|
|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|