Buky Ⰱ

Buky is the second letter of Glagolitic and it is there because Greek could not supply it. By the ninth century the Greek letter beta had long since softened from a stop to a fricative, so a Byzantine scholar setting out to write Slavonic had a sign for v and no sign at all for a plain b, which Slavonic uses constantly. Buky fills that hole, and its presence in second place is one of the clearest signs that the alphabet was designed rather than borrowed: a script taken over wholesale from Greek would have inherited the gap along with everything else.

The letter takes the numeral two, which it holds by the Glagolitic principle of counting the letters in their own order rather than by any Greek precedent, since there is no Greek letter behind it to inherit a value from.

The sound itself has been stable. Where Slavonic wrote buky the modern Slavic languages still have b, and the letter has none of the complicated afterlife that the nasal vowels or the reduced vowels had. What did change is the word its name comes from. The Slavonic plural buky, letters or writing, is the ancestor of the ordinary Slavic words for a letter of the alphabet and for a book, so the name of the second sign of the alphabet is the same word that later Slavic speakers used for the thing the alphabet makes.

Cyrillic buky is the point at which the arithmetic of the two Slavonic alphabets parts company for good. Glagolitic counts its own letters in sequence and gives buky the value two. Cyrillic, keeping the Greek numeral values, has nothing to give it: there is no Greek letter in that slot, because the Slavic b is exactly the sound Greek lacked, so the Cyrillic letter is passed over in the counting and carries no numeral at all. Every value after this one is displaced between the two scripts, and the displacement grows as more Slavic-only letters are passed over.

That difference is a practical tool. A number written out in letters in an early Slavonic manuscript can often be read only one way, and reading it the other way gives a different figure, so a numeral in a text of uncertain background can indicate which system the scribe had been trained in. Where a Cyrillic manuscript preserves Glagolitic arithmetic, the usual explanation is that it was copied from a Glagolitic exemplar and the numbers were carried across unconverted.

The names match in both scripts and the sound matches, which is the pattern across the whole alphabet: the two scripts share a language, an order and a set of names, and share very little of their appearance.