What ꓾ means
It marks less finality than the Lisu full stop.
Between 1908 and 1914, Ba Thaw, a Karen evangelist from Myanmar, adapted Latin letter shapes to write Lisu. James Outram Fraser and Lisu pastors later revised the script, also called the Fraser script or Old Lisu.
The history of Fraser script punctuation reflects the script’s mixed design: Latin punctuation shapes were reused as tone letters, marks written inside syllables to show tone. ꓾ is one of two dedicated sentence-ending marks; ꓿ is the stronger one. Lisu writing later adopted punctuation from European and Chinese traditions, including question and exclamation marks, brackets, and angle quotes for book titles.
New Lisu, a separate writing system using Latin letters, was devised by the Chinese government in the 1950s. Advanced Lisu, another Latin-based system, was proposed and used on the internet in Thailand in 2000. These are alternatives written in Latin characters; ꓾ belongs to the Lisu script revised by Fraser and Lisu pastors.
Why isn't ꓾ just a hyphen and period?
It is one Lisu punctuation character, not a hyphen plus a period.
The encoding proposal records several designs, with the dot level with or below the bar. The sequence -. is two separately encoded characters, so it cannot stand in for this mark’s own typography or character identity.
A punctuation mark in Fraser or Old Lisu writing; outside Lisu text, its role needs explanation.
Keep ꓾ intact: replacing it with `-.` turns one Lisu mark into two characters.
Don't confuse it with
2Questions people ask
1Why does ꓾ show as a box on some devices?
Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.
How to type ꓾
꓾\A4FECodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.