Buky: The Glagolitic Letter (Value 2)

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.