A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD)

A letter can also combine with other letters to form a lexical item. In such lexical items the letters of a word can be fully spelled out as in the case of b-o-n-o and v-a-n, or partially spelled out, as in the case of a(-l)^sound (‘alarm’):

             b                                o                          n                                  o

bond (in finance)

    v                                  a                                     n                                   a(-l)                           sound

van (a town in Turkey)                                                                            alarm

Alphabetisms, as the name suggests, are also cases where letters are signed one by one. In these examples, the letters are the initial letters of the words that make up the name of an organization or institution, as in nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organization):

n                                 a                            t                             o

nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)

A highly infrequent type of initialization is seen in one of the signs for ‘toilet’. This involves the mimicking of the letters w and c together on the same hand.

                            w                                            c                                         wc

Finally, borrowed multiple-letter fingerspelled forms are not confined to words, compounds, and alphabetisms, but suffixes have been borrowed from Turkish as well, see [Morphology - 2.1.2.].