Buky Б

Buky stands second and writes b. Its name is the Slavonic word for letters or characters, a plural, and it is the second half of azbuka, the word the tradition uses for the alphabet itself. Alone among the opening letters it carries no numeral value at all.

That absence is not an oversight, and understanding it explains the numeral system of the whole alphabet. Cyrillic numeration is Greek numeration, taken over wholesale: alpha is 1, beta is 2, gamma is 3, and the Slavonic letters that correspond to Greek letters inherit the Greek numbers along with the Greek shapes. But Byzantine Greek by the ninth century pronounced beta as v, so the letter that looked like beta was needed for the Slavonic v, and it took the value 2 with it. Slavonic still had a b to write, and the sign made for it arrived after the numbers had already been allocated. There was no free slot.

So buky sits in the alphabet in second place and stands outside the number series entirely, and the same is true of every other letter added for a sound Greek did not have. A reader can therefore look at a Cyrillic letter, ask whether it carries a number, and get a reliable answer to a different question: whether the sign came in with the Greek uncial or was supplied afterwards for Slavonic.

The letter itself survives in every modern Cyrillic alphabet, still second, still writing b, still numberless in the rare modern contexts where the old numeration is used.

The origin of the buky letterform is genuinely contested, and it is the clearest small case of the larger argument about how Cyrillic was assembled.

One camp reads it as a differentiated beta. On this account whoever made the alphabet took the Greek letter twice: once in its plain uncial form for v, which is what beta had come to mean in spoken Byzantine Greek, and once modified for b, which Greek could no longer supply. The two Cyrillic letters would then be siblings, made at the same moment out of one Greek model, and their visible resemblance is the evidence.

The other camp derives buky from the Glagolitic letter of the same name, redrawn in a Greek manner to sit on a Greek page. The evidence here is structural rather than visual: buky carries no numeral, which is the signature of the letters that came from outside the Greek series, and the Glagolitic alphabet already had a fully worked out sign for b that a maker of Cyrillic would have had no reason to discard.

A third position holds that neither derivation can be demonstrated, because the shapes involved are too simple for resemblance to count as descent and because no exemplar of either alphabet survives from the century in which the question was decided. That is not a compromise between the first two positions. It is a claim that the evidence available cannot bear the weight put on it, and on the present manuscript record it is difficult to refute.