Bet (letter)
Bet or
Beth is the second
letter of many
Semitic abjads, including
Phoenician,
Aramaic,
Hebrew Syriac and
Arabic alphabet . Its value is a
voiced bilabial plosive,
IPA .
This letter's name means "house" in various Semitic languages (Hebrew:
bayit, Arabic:
bayt), and appears to derive from a
Middle Bronze Age picture of a house by
acrophony.
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the
Greek Beta,
Latin B, and
Cyrillic Б,
'.
The letter is named
bā, and is written is several way depending in its position in the word:
This letter is named
bet, following the modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation,
bet (), in
Israel and by most
Jews familiar with Hebrew, although many
Ashkenazi speakers pronounce it
beis (), and some Jews pronounce it
beth (). It is also named
beth, following the
Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation, in academic circles.
Variations on written form/pronunciation:
There are two orthographic variants of this letter, which alter the pronunciation:
*
בּ bet /b/and
*
ב vet [v], [b] (among Egyptian Jews), likely used to be
Bet with the dagesh
When the Bet has a "dot" in its center, known as a
dagesh, then it is pronounced as [b]. There are various rules in
Hebrew grammar that stipulate when and why a dagesh is used.
Bet without the dagesh (Veth)
When this letter appears as
ב without the
dagesh ("dot") in its center then it is pronounced as a
voiced labiodental fricative [v].
Significance of Bet, Mystical and otherwise:
Bet in
gematria symbolizes 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.
Rashi points out that the letter is closed on three sides and open on one; this is to teach you that you may question about what happened after creation, but not what happened before it, or what is above the heavens or below the earth.
In
discrete mathematics, beth represents the
beth numbers that stand for the power of infinite sets.
