That's not true. the command is:
. .profile

The filename is ".profile" and the leading "." is a command. It looks like your shell is not stubbling on the argument though. Rather it looks like your shell has trouble with the command called ".". So what shell are you using? That error message would be expected if you are using csh or tcsh. However .profile is not for use by csh or tcsh. They use .login instead. With them you would do:
source .login
but you really should switch to bash or ksh, they are better shells.

Edit:

about the aliases...this is yet another reason to dislike csh. You are defining unusable aliases that would have no effect even if you could invoke them. The csh syntax is:
alias csp "cd /data/apps"

The equal sign, while allowed, renders the alias useless. Get used to behavior like that if you stay with csh.