Hebrew punctuation is similar to that of English and other Western languages, Modern Hebrew having imported additional punctuation marks from these languages in order to avoid the ambiguities sometimes occasioned by the relative paucity of such symbols in Biblical Hebrew.
Punctuation
Quotation marks
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). An example of this system is .
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 ), with both quotation marks high. 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.
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.
Period, question mark, exclamation mark, comma
Periods (full stops), question marks, exclamation marks, and commas are used as in English.
A Hebrew period in a traditional serif face usually looks like a tiny tilted square (a diamond; ◊). This is also true for the dot part of the question mark, and exclamation mark.
In Arabic, which is also written from right to left, the question mark 〈〉 is mirrored right-to-left from the English question mark. (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 〈?〉. 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.
Colon and
Stemming from Biblical Hebrew, a 〈 〉 is the equivalent of a period, and is used in some writings such as prayer books. Since a is absent from the Hebrew keyboard layout, and looks very similar to the colon 〈:〉, a colon is often substituted for it.
Vertical bar and paseq
The paseq () 〈〉 originates from Biblical Hebrew. As it is not on a standard Hebrew keyboard, a vertical bar 〈|〉 is often used instead. 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. The height of the paseq depends on the font, but it is generally the same as the letter .
Like much Biblical Hebrew punctuation, the meaning of the paseq is not known, although a number of hypotheses exist. The word itself means "separator", but this name was a medieval innovation by later Jews; the root does not exist in the Biblical Hebrew canon. James Kennedy, an English hebraist, wrote a book about the paseq in which he hypothesized that it was an ancient mark serving the same purpose as the modern word sic (in non-Latin texts). The Westminster Leningrad Codex contains over 500 paseqs; William Wickes, an influential scholar in this area, divide them into nine classes; Wilhelm Gesenius, drawing on Wickes, divided them into five:
as a divider between two words which end and begin with the same letters, e.g. (Shalom, ma) between identical or very similar words, e.g. (the dancer danced) between words which are to a high degree contradictory, e.g. (God, evil) between words otherwise liable to be wrongly connected, e.g. , which prevents the somewhat bizarre phrase (, spoon) (, queue) from being wrongly read as (), meaning button. "and lastly, between heterogeneous terms, as Eleazar the High Priest, and Joshua" (see context in )
An example may be found in in the Westminster Leningrad Codex and many other manuscripts:
Hyphen and maqaf
The () 〈〉 is the Hebrew hyphen 〈-〉, and has virtually the same purpose for connecting two words as in English. It is different from the hyphen in its positioning (a hyphen is in the middle in terms of height, the is at the top) and it has a biblical origin, unlike many other Modern Hebrew punctuation symbols, which have simply been imported from European languages.