Dots

Dots

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Semi column, column, exclamation, question marks and other characters in alphabetical system use the dot. A dot, two dots, three dots, all carries different functions among each other.

  Another name of it is period. One of the punctuation marks is the full stop. The full stop, there is not much study done for it, although it is taught in language classes. It seems like there is no importance of studying the full stop. People just use it or take it for granted. Full stop, the punctuation mark is commonly placed at the end of several different types of sentences in English and many other languages. A full stop consists of a small dot placed at the end of a line of text. There are many functions of a full stop. In a few Asean languages and Chinese full stops are drawn as a small circle, not a dot. A vertical line ("|"), this full stop is known as a poorna viraam, and used to mark the end of a sentence in Devanagari script used to write Hindi, Sanskrit and Marathi

Handwriting have put full stops to many styles of shapes, it is determined by the handwriting style, it can look like a dot, a circle or a comma-like shape. There is no standard for a full stop style in handwriting. In printed matters, especially for different fonts, period for (i) is disturbed with a small letter before it, but it is safe when the letter before it is in capital form. For language learners, at times this situation is misleading. For example,

Final

fiasco

finish

This is an Arial font type and font size is 20, this situation changes when the font size reaches 21 and above. For example:

Final

fiasco

finish

In computer screens, the full stop looks like a dot, actually it is a hexagon, like STOP sign beside roads. In printed matters, normal computer printers, the full stop, the dot or the period have many shapes as well, but it is not round. In books, machine printed, it is a perfect coloured round.

Full stops are sometimes typed with emotions, people thump the pen or pencil to the paper to show a strong expression in the last sentence. ‘Full stop’ is an oral expression to say things are decided, final, unchanged. Full stops also exist after abbreviations, Jr. for Junior Mara Science College Jr., Dr., Mrs. In initialism, Western English more often use full stop (C.I.A.) than in British English, (BBC), a few has and a few hasn’t.

In helping the dyslexic readers, spaces after the full stop is recommended to be longer before the letter, dyslexic language learners face difficulties in recognizing an idea with another. A debate was behind this, whether a longer space would help the learners or the otherwise. In a normal situation, writers put a short pause after a full stop.

In DNS lookups and file names, the dot is called a delimiter and not a full stop. It is used in the computing world. The shape is the same. E-mails, addresses or sites, search engines use full stop in the addresses. Example is www.yahoo.com.my. When pronounced yahoodot, it puts the name yahood in the middle, perhaps there is significance or a coincidence for it.

The importance of the dot is evident in computer programming as well; it corresponds with the Unicode and ASCII character 46, or 0x2E. C and C++ languages, the programming language use it as a means of accessing a member of a struct or a class, respectively. To separate the extension of a file name from the name of the file, in writing path names - similar to the ‘/’ in Unix-based systems and the ‘\’ in MS-DOS-based systems, RISC OS uses full stops to separate levels of the hierarchical file system. The dot represents the working directory in Unix-like systems, two dots (..) is the parent of the working directory, the Bash shell uses the dot as a synonym for the source command, that reads the file content before executing them.

An object from far coming nearer is first seen as a dot, and as it gets nearer, it shapes up to be of a figure. Dots make up lines, lines are a series of linked dots, lines on paper or that shapes up in real world. It makes alphabets, sentences. Dots make up tones in a drawing, called the dotting technique. In art expressions, it creates figure, lines is a series of dots joined together. Newspaper characters are from dots as well; it creates pictures in a 4 colour scheme.

Dots carry meaning, semi column or column create emoticons, gives instant feeling to handphone users, using it creatively form as the eyes of emoticons. Combined with comma, unexplained reason why it is typed first, ; -), ;-[,  :’(.  Not as these  (-: , )-: , )-‘: , ]-;, difficult to understand, because written other way around. Smiley emoticons, the computer changed it directly to real emoticon, cannot type in original form.

In conclusion, full stop carries meaning in people’s lives, it was created with  purposes, it is part of handwriting, typewritten format of writing, exploring gives new knowledge to writers, readers and people in general.