Bet writes a plain b and continues the Semitic consonant behind the Hebrew beth, the Syriac beth and the Arabic ba. The correspondence is exact and uncontested. What distinguishes this letter is its name, which is not merely recognisable as a relative of the Northwest Semitic one but is the same word, and a word still in use.
Ge'ez bet means a house. It is a live noun, and it turns up in the ordinary compounds of the religious vocabulary: bete krestiyan, the house of Christians, is the term for a church building, and Beta Israel, the house of Israel, is the name the Jewish community of Ethiopia uses of itself. The Hebrew letter name beth means the same thing in Hebrew for the same reason, because both continue one Semitic word.
This is one of a small number of places where the acrophonic principle behind the Canaanite alphabet is still visible from the Ethiopian side. Most Ge'ez letter names have worn down into forms carrying no sense in the language. Here the sense is intact and can be stated as a fact rather than as a reconstruction, which is the test applied before any meaning is recorded against these twenty-six rows.
The compound bete krestiyan also shows the construct state, the Semitic way of joining two nouns so that the first is defined by the second with no word standing for of. Hebrew and Arabic build phrases in the same way, and it is one of the constructions an English translation always has to expand into something longer than the original.