Pistemerkintöjen

Pistemerkintöjen is a Finnish term describing a family of marks formed by dots or dot-like symbols that function as punctuation, annotations, or typographic markers in writing systems and digital text. The concept covers signs whose defining feature is a point and whose purpose is to organize, separate, or indicate relationships between elements in a line or block of text.

Common examples include the interpunct (·), a middle dot used to separate items or syllables in some languages; bullet points (•) used to introduce items in a list; and, in some contexts, ordinary decimal points or similar dot-based markers used in digital encoding. In typography and typesetting, these marks are chosen for readability and visual rhythm.

Historically, dot-like punctuation appears in ancient manuscripts as punctus marks to indicate pauses. Medieval and early modern printers developed several variants, such as punctus elevatus and punctus interrogativus, to signal sentence structure and intonation. With the standardization of punctuation and the digitization of text, dot-based marks have been incorporated into modern typographic grammars and Unicode.

Usage today is context-dependent. In continuous prose, dots mark sentence boundaries; in lists, bullets provide structure; in multilingual contexts and technical writing, dot-based marks help separate items, denote decimal fractions in some locales, or indicate special annotations in markup. In Finnish typography, the period and comma are primary sentence and decimal separators, while interpuncts and bullets are used selectively in design, brand names, or borrowed terms.

See also: punctuation, typography, Unicode punctuation blocks, list markers, diacritic marks.