I’m sorry, but the example in your comment is nonstandard usage. The part after the semicolon would typically be an independent clause, whereas the “because” marks yours as a dependent clause.
There are still comma-like uses though. The major one I can think of is as a separator in a list where each element is long, possibly containing commas of its own.
English spelling wasn’t even remotely standardized at that time. So phonetic was pretty much all there was