Comma titles that follow a name: "John Smith, Ph.D." Similarly in lists that are presented with an inversion: "...; socks, green: 3 pairs; socks, red: 2 pairs; tie, regimental: 1". Commas may be used to indicate that a word, or a group of words, has been omitted, as in "The cat was white; the dog, brown." (Here the comma replaces "was".) Commas are placed before, after, or around a noun or pronoun used independently in speaking to some person, place or thing: In his 1785 essay "An Essay on Punctuation", Joseph Robertson advocated a comma between the subject and predicate of
Comma distinguish it from the Arabic diacritic "" (), representing the vowel , which is similarly comma-shaped. In Arabic texts, Western-styled comma () is used as a decimal point. Reversed comma () is used in Sindhi when written in Arabic script. It is different from the standard Arabic comma. Hebrew script is also written from right to left. However, Hebrew punctuation includes only a regular comma (). Dravidian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam also use the punctuation mark in similar usage to that of European languages with similar spacing. In the common character encoding systems Unicode and ASCII,