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
Comma , , "dòuhào") in China. Since East Asian typography permits commas to join clauses dealing with certain topics or lines of thought, commas may separate subjects and predicates and constructions that would be considered a "comma splice" in English are acceptable and commonly encountered. Korean punctuation uses both commas and interpuncts for lists. In Unicode 5.2.0 "numbers with commas" ( through ) were added to the Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement block for compatibility with the ARIB STD B24 character set. The comma in the Arabic script (used by Arabic, Urdu, and Persian, etc.) is inverted, upside-down: " (), in order to