Punctuation vowel of the word. Arabic, Urdu, and Persian—written from right to left—use a reversed question mark: , and a reversed comma: . This is a modern innovation; pre-modern Arabic did not use punctuation. Hebrew, which is also written from right to left, uses the same characters as in English, and . Originally, Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 17th century, Sanskrit and Marathi, both written using Devanagari, started using the vertical bar to end a line of prose and double vertical bars in verse. Punctuation was not used in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing until the adoption of punctuation from
Comma signified by a dot at the bottom, middle, or top of the line. For a short passage (a "komma"), a "media distinctio" dot was placed mid-level ( · ). This is the origin of the concept of a comma, although the name came to be used for the mark itself instead of the clause it separated. The mark used today is descended from a diagonal slash, or "virgula suspensiva" ( / ), used from the 13th to 17th centuries to represent a pause. The modern comma was first used by Aldus Manutius. In general, the comma shows that the words