The word itself means "separator", but this name was a medieval innovation by later Jews the root פּסק does not exist in the Biblical Hebrew canon. Like much Biblical Hebrew punctuation, the meaning of the paseq is not known, although a number of hypotheses exist. The height of the paseq depends on the font, but it is generally the same as the letter א. However, it is seldom if ever used in modern Israeli Hebrew, and is not mentioned on the Academy of the Hebrew Language's guide to modern Hebrew punctuation. As it is not on a standard Hebrew keyboard, a vertical bar ⟨|⟩ is often used instead. The paseq ( פָּסֵק) ⟨ ׀⟩ originates from Biblical Hebrew. In the image above, the paseq can be seen on the last occurrence of the word אֱלֹהִים Since a sof pasuq is absent from the Hebrew keyboard layout, and looks very similar to the colon ⟨:⟩, a colon is often substituted for it. Stemming from Biblical Hebrew, a sof pasuq ⟨ ׃ ⟩ is the equivalent of a period, and is used in some writings such as prayer books. Note that Hebrew commas are not mirrored - although that was once suggested (together with mirrored semi-colons, 'capital' letters, etc.) by a 19th century British minister called William Withers Ewbank. (Some browsers may display the character in the previous sentence as a forward question mark due to font or text directionality issues.) Hebrew is also written right-to-left, but uses a question mark that appears on the page in the same orientation as the English ⟨?⟩. In Arabic, which is also written from right to left, the question mark ⟨ ؟⟩ is mirrored right-to-left from the English question mark. This is also true for the dot part of the question mark, and exclamation mark.
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Periods ( full stops), question marks, exclamation marks, and commas are used as in English.Ī Hebrew period in a traditional serif face usually looks like a tiny tilted square (a diamond ◊).
Period, question mark, exclamation mark, comma Merkhaʾot - מֵרְכָאוֹת (plural of merkha - מֵרְכָא) a similar punctuation mark unique to Hebrew is called gershayim - גרשיים
In addition, the quotation mark is often used for the similar looking but different gershayim mark ⟨ ״⟩, as that too is absent from the Hebrew keyboard. This is due to the advent of the Hebrew keyboard layout, which lacks the opening quotation mark ⟨ „⟩, as well as to the lack in Hebrew of “ smart quotes” in certain word processing programs.
However, this distinction in Hebrew between opening and closing quotation marks has mostly disappeared, and today, quotations are most often punctuated as they are in English (such as ”שָׁלוֹם ”), with both quotation marks high. An example of this system is „שָׁלוֹם ”. With most printed Hebrew texts from the early 1970s and before, opening quotation marks are low (as in German), and closing ones are high, often going above the letters themselves (as opposed to the gershayim, which is level with the top of letters). Old style Hebrew quotation marks, from a 1923 translation of Robinson Crusoe