A + B = А + Б

It's always been pretty aparent that in the sequence of the word азбука /alphabet/, it was representing the letters /a/ and /b/ to some extent, just like you can see in the English alphabet. Of course, though, it's actually a sequence of the two first letters of Greek, Alpha + Bet(a), from which our writing system comes. I was reading up on an old form of the Cyrillic alphabet and I noticed that the first two letters were presented as:

Літери	Назва літер
А	азъ
Б	боѵкы

(Pardon my characters, I don't any for old Cyrillic, nor do most people I think. The 3rd chatacter in боѵкы is supposed to be a lower-case Cyrillic upsilon)

It then struck me that the names of the letters are something like [az] and [bukɪ], very similar to [azbuka], the word for alphabet. It seems that things aren't so different after all between languages. Incidentally, in my youth I sometimes inserted a /в/ into азбука creating азбуква. I guess deep down I just wanted it to go one letter further.