Punctuation the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight". Cecil Hartley's poem identifies their relative values: <poem style=margin:4em;> The stop point out, with truth, the time of pause A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause. At ev'ry comma, stop while "one" you count; At semicolon, "two" is the amount; A colon doth require the time of "three"; The period "four", as learned men agree. </poem> The use of punctuation was not standardised until after the invention of printing. According to the 1885 edition of "The American Printer", the importance of punctuation was noted in various sayings by children such as: <poem style=margin:4em;>
Comma the full stops are frequently discarded. Punctuation has been added to many languages which originally developed without it, including a number of different comma forms. European languages like German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese use the same comma as English with similar spacing, though usage may be somewhat different. For instance, in Standard German, subordinate clauses are always preceded by commas. Modern Greek uses the same Unicode comma for its "kómma" () and it is officially romanized as a Latin comma, but it has additional roles owing to its conflation with the former hypodiastole, a curved interpunct used to disambiguate