Bet (letter)

Bet

Bet, also called Beth, Beh, or Vet, is the second letter of the Semitic writing systems. It is used in many languages, like Phoenician bēt, Hebrew bēt, Aramaic bēṯ, Syriac bēṯ, and Arabic bāʾ. This letter makes the sound “b” or sometimes “v.”

The name of the letter means “house” in these languages. It started from an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph that looked like a house. This idea came from the sound of the word in Proto-Semitic, an old language that affected many others.

The Phoenician version of Bet helped make letters in other alphabets. It inspired the Greek letter beta (Β, β), the Latin letter B (B, b), and the Cyrillic letters Be (Б, б) and Ve (В, в). It also influenced the Armenian letter Ben (Բ, բ).

Origin

The name bet comes from a West Semitic word meaning "house." The shape of the letter bet started from an old symbol called Proto-Sinaitic. This symbol may have been inspired by an Egyptian picture of a house.

Arabic bāʾ

The Arabic letter ب is named بَاءْ bāʾ (bāʔ). It can look different depending on where it appears in a word.

Bāʾ usually makes the /b/ sound. But in some names and borrowed words, it can also make the /p/ sound, like in بَرْسِيلْ (Persil).

Bāʾ is the first letter of the Quran and the first letter of Basmala. When bāʾ is used as a prefix, it can mean "by" or "with".

Main article: Pe (Persian letter)

A special form of bāʾ, with three dots below instead of one, is called pe. This form is used in the Persian alphabet and the Kurdish alphabet to show the /p/ sound, which does not exist in Arabic. It is written as:

Hebrew bet

The Hebrew letter בֵּית‎ can make two sounds: "b" and "v". When Hebrew has special marks called niqqud diacritics, the two sounds are shown by a dot in the middle of the letter called a dagesh. The dot means the sound is "b", and no dot means the sound is "v". In everyday writing without these marks, the letter looks the same for both sounds.

In modern Hebrew, this letter is most often called bet or vet. Some people may call it beis or veis. As a number, it stands for 2. It is also the first letter of the Torah, which is very important in Jewish tradition.

Orthographic variants
Various print fonts			Cursive Hebrew	Rashi script
Serif	Sans-serif	Monospaced
ב	ב	ב

Syriac beth

In the Syriac alphabet, the second letter is ܒ — Beth (ܒܹܝܬ). It is one of six letters that can make two different sounds.

When Beth is spoken with a strong sound, it makes the sound b. When spoken softly, it is usually pronounced like v. In some areas, the soft Beth sounds more like w.

The way Beth is pronounced depends on where it appears in a word. In some places, Beth is always spoken with its strong sound.

Beth
Madnḫaya Beth
Serṭo Beth
Esṭrangela Beth

Other uses

Mathematics

In set theory, the beth numbers show the sizes of very large sets that go on forever.

Character encodings

The Bet letter is found in many old writing systems. It is used in Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic scripts, and others. The sound it makes can be like the "b" in "bat" or the "v" in "very".