This paper examines fingerspelled borrowings from spoken Russian into Russian Sign Language (RSL), specifically lexical items incorporating the manual alphabet. The research utilizes RSL descriptions across different historical periods alongside modern RSL corpus data. The study identifies the primary types of borrowings: full fingerspelling, partially nativized forms, fully nativized forms, and various hybrid formations combining a native sign with a fingerspelled component (such as initialization, compounds, and analytic constructions). Tracing the dynamics of their emergence and adaptation reveals that while borrowings were nearly absent in the nineteenth century, a massive influx began in the 1950s. Furthermore, RSL data is compared against borrowability hierarchies established for spoken languages. The results largely confirm these hierarchies: nouns dominate the borrowed lexicon, verbs remain extremely rare, and most fingerspelled items relate to cultural domains, whereas basic vocabulary remains almost entirely free of borrowings. The processes of reduction and restructuring within fingerspelled words correlate with the phonological adaptation of loanwords in spoken languages. A comparison with other sign languages highlights both commonalities and differences. While RSL demonstrates similar borrowing types and adaptation mechanisms, a notable typological divergence exists: whereas certain sign languages employ initialization to express genus-species relations, RSL predominantly utilizes analytic constructions where the generic concept is conveyed by a native sign and the specific modifier by a fingerspelled component. Ultimately, these findings underscore the modality-specific nature of borrowing in RSL; the impossibility of direct phonetic transfer generates distinct forms (initialized signs and hybrid constructions) lacking direct analogues in spoken languages.
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