Ethiopic Syllable Be

Its vowel depends on the surrounding spelling. In Amharic, ብ is b with a quick, unstressed “uh” vowel or b by itself.

South Arabian writing reached Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, around the 8th century BCE; early Ethiopian alphabet evidence comes from Dakhanamo. Ethiopic inscriptions for Ge’ez, an early regional language, date to the 1st–3rd centuries CE. By the 4th century CE, vowel forms made Ethiopic an abugida: characters combine consonants and vowels. Amharic, Tigrinya, and Tigre adopted it later.