U+0835 SAMARITAN PUNCTUATION SHIYYAALAA

U+0835 was added to Unicode in version 5.2 (2009). It belongs to the block Samaritan in the Basic Multilingual Plane.

This character is a Other Punctuation and is mainly used in the Samaritan script. The character is also known as question.

The glyph is not a composition. It has a Neutral East Asian Width. In bidirectional context it acts as Right To Left and is not mirrored. In text U+0835 behaves as Alphabetic regarding line breaks. It has type Other for sentence and Other for word breaks. The Grapheme Cluster Break is Any.

The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:

The Samaritan alphabet is used by the Samaritans for religious writings, including the Samaritan Pentateuch, writings in Samaritan Hebrew, and for commentaries and translations in Samaritan Aramaic and occasionally Arabic.

Samaritan is a direct descendant of the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, which was a variety of the Phoenician alphabet in which large parts of the Hebrew Bible were originally penned. All these scripts are believed to be descendants of the Proto-Sinaitic script. That script was used by the ancient Israelites, both Jews and Samaritans. The better-known "square script" Hebrew alphabet traditionally used by Jews is a stylized version of the Aramaic alphabet which they adopted from the Persian Empire (which in turn adopted it from the Arameans). After the fall of the Persian Empire, Judaism used both scripts before settling on the Aramaic form. For a limited time thereafter, the use of paleo-Hebrew (proto-Samaritan) among Jews was retained only to write the Tetragrammaton, but soon that custom was also abandoned.

The Samaritan alphabet first became known to the Western world with the publication of a manuscript of the Samaritan Pentateuch in 1631 by Jean Morin. In 1616 the traveler Pietro della Valle had purchased a copy of the text in Damascus, and this manuscript, now known as Codex B, was deposited in a Parisian library.