Bet (letter)

Common card · No. 234166

Bet, Beth, Vet, or Ba is the second letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician bēt 𐤁, Hebrew bēṯ ב, Aramaic bēṯ 𐡁, Syriac bēṯ ܒ and Arabic bāʾ ب. It is also related to the Ancient North Arabian 𐪈‎, South Arabian 𐩨, and Ge'ez በ. Its sound value is the voiced bilabial stop ⟨b⟩ or the voiced labiodental fricative ⟨v⟩. The letter's name means "house" in various Semitic languages (Arabic bayt, Akkadian bītu, bētu, Hebrew: bayīṯ, Phoenician bēt etc.; ultimately all from Proto-Semitic *bayt), and appears to derive from an Egyptian hieroglyph of a house by acrophony. The Phoenician letter gave rise to, among others, the Greek beta (Β, β), Latin B (B, b) and Cyrillic Be (Б, б) and Ve (В, в), and also the Armenian letter Ben (Բ, բ).

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