A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD)

Initialization is the process of using one of the letters of the manual alphabet (together with movement and location) to form a lexical item. 6% of the TİD vocabulary contains a finger spelled letter, and the vast majority of these, around 91%, are letters that either stand on their own or are used in combination with signs to produce a lexical item. A very small number of words contain all the letters in a word, e.g. b-o-n-o ‘bond’ below. In most cases, where the initialized sign is only a single letter, it switches to the dominant hand. If it is made up of two (asymmetric) parts, the dominant and non-dominant hand may be swapped.

   hıgh_school (Turkish: lise)       be_necessary (Turkish: lazım)       navy_blue (Turkish: lacivert)

 physics (Turkish: fizik)

When a finger-spelled form is used together with a sign, it can precede or follow that sign, or it can be articulated simultaneously with it. An example of a finger-spelled form preceding a sign is o^car 'Opel', which can also be signed in the reverse order:

o^car‘Opel’                                                                            car^o ‘Opel’