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 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,