Aristophanes of Byzantium needed to complete each fragment of text when reading aloud (not to comply with rules of grammar, which were not applied to punctuation marks until thousands of years later). For a short passage (a "komma"), a "stigmḕ mésē" dot was placed mid-level (·). This is the origin of the modern comma punctuation mark, and its name. For a longer passage (a "kolon"), a "hypostigmḗ" dot was placed level with the bottom of the text (.), similar to a modern colon or semicolon, and for very long pauses ("periodos"), a "stigmḕ teleía" point near the top of the line of text
Slash (punctuation) a slash distinguished from such other marks derives from the medieval European virgule (, which was used as a period, scratch comma, and caesura mark. (The first sense was eventually lost to the low dot and the other two developed separately into the comma and caesura mark .) Its use as a comma became especially widespread in France, where it was also used to mark the continuation of a word onto the next line of a page, a sense later taken on by the hyphen . The Fraktur script used throughout Central Europe in the early modern period used a