Bet, Beth, Beh, or Vet is the second letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician bēt, Hebrew bēt, Aramaic bēṯ, Syriac bēṯ ܒ, and Arabic bāʾ . 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
), 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).
The name bet is derived from the West Semitic word for "house" (as in Hebrew: בַּיִת|bayt), and the shape of the letter derives from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph that may have been based on the Egyptian hieroglyph Pr
The Arabic letter Arabic: ب is named Arabic: بَاءْ . It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:
The letter normally renders pronounced as //b// sound, except in some names and loanwords where it can also render pronounced as //p//, often Arabized as pronounced as //b//, as in Arabic: بَرْسِيلْ (Persil). For pronounced as //p//, it may be used interchangeably with the Persian letter Persian: [[پ]] - pe (with 3 dots) in this case.
Bāʾ is the first letter of the Quran, the first letter of Basmala.[1] The letter bāʾ as a prefix may function as a preposition meaning "by" or "with". Some tafsirs interpreted the positioning of bāʾ as the opener of the Qur'an with "by My (God's) cause (all is present and happen)".[2]
See main article: Pe (Persian letter). A variant letter of bāʾ named pe is used in Persian with three dots below instead of just one dot below. However, it is not included on one of the 28 letters on the Arabic alphabet. It is thus written as:
Hebrew spelling:
The Hebrew letter represents two different phonemes: a "b" sound (pronounced as //b//) (bet) and a "v" sound (pronounced as //v//) (vet). When Hebrew is written Ktiv menuqad (with niqqud diacritics) the two are distinguished by a dot (called a dagesh) in the centre of the letter for pronounced as //b// and no dot for pronounced as //v//. In modern Hebrew, the more commonly used Ktiv hasar niqqud spelling, which does not use diacritics, does not visually distinguish between the two phonemes.
This letter is named bet and vet, following the modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation, bet and vet (pronounced as //bet//), in Israel and by most Jews familiar with Hebrew, although some non-Israeli Ashkenazi speakers pronounce it beis (or bais)[3] and veis (pronounced as //bejs//) (or vais or vaiz).[4] It is also named beth, following the Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation, in academic circles.
In modern Hebrew the frequency of the usage of bet, out of all the letters, is 4.98%.
See main article: Modern Hebrew phonology.
| Name | Symbol | IPA | Transliteration | Example | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vet | align=center | pronounced as //v// | v | vote | |
| Bet | align=center | pronounced as //b// | b | boat | |
When the Bet appears as with a "dot" in its center, known as a dagesh, then it represents pronounced as //b//. There are various rules in Hebrew grammar that stipulate when and why a dagesh is used.
In Ktiv menuqad spelling, which uses diacritics, when the letter appears as without the dagesh ("dot") in its center it represents a voiced labiodental fricative: pronounced as //v//. In Ktiv hasar niqqud spelling, without diacritics, the letter without the dot may represent either phoneme.
Bet in gematria represents the number 2.
As a prefix, the letter bet may function as a preposition meaning "in", "at", or "with".
Bet is the first letter of the Torah. As Bet is the number 2 in gematria, this is said to symbolize that there are two parts to Torah: the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. According to Jewish legend, the letter Bet was specially chosen among the 22 letters in Hebrew by God as the first letter of Torah as it begins with "Bereshit (In the beginning) God created heaven and earth."[5]
Genesis Rabbah points out that the letter is closed on three sides and open on one; this is indicate that one can investigate what happened after creation, but not what happened before it, or what is above the heavens or below the earth.[6]
In the Syriac alphabet, the second letter is Syriac: ܒ — Beth (Syriac: ܒܹܝܬ). It is one of six letters that represents two associated sounds (the others are Gimel, Dalet, Kaph, Pe and Taw). When Beth has a hard pronunciation (qûššāyâ) it is a . When Beth has a soft pronunciation (rûkkāḵâ) it is traditionally pronounced as a, similar to its Hebrew form. However, in eastern dialects, the soft Beth is more often pronounced as a, and can form diphthongs with its preceding vowel. Whether Beth should be pronounced as a hard or soft sound is generally determined by its context within a word. However, wherever it is traditionally geminate within a word, even in dialects that no longer distinguish double consonants, it is hard. In the West Syriac dialect, some speakers always pronounce Beth with its hard sound.
Beth, when attached to the beginning of a word, represents the preposition 'in, with, at'. As a numeral, the letter represents the number 2, and, using various systems of dashes above or below, can stand for 2,000 and 20,000.
In set theory, the beth numbers stand for powers of infinite sets.