Numerals in Tibetan

This chapter provides a computational analysis of the variation in the pronunciation of some Tibetan numbers. In Tibetan, the names for numbers greater than ten are formed by concatenating the word for a number less than ten with the word that means ‘ten.’ We refer to these combinations as “compound numerals.” In particular, numbers from eleven to nineteen are formed by prefixing [ > dZu] ‘ten’ to the number being added to ten. For example, [ > dZuNa] ‘fifteen’ has the number [Na] ‘five’ as the first element of the compound, so it can be analyzed as [ > dZu-Na], literally meaning ‘ten-five.’ To form multiples of ten greater than ten, the root meaning ‘ten’ is concatenated as a suffix to the number being multiplied by ten, as in [Nab > dZu] ‘fifty’ (literally ‘five-ten’). This example shows that there is some variation in pronunciation across different compound numerals. While it appears that [Na] ‘five’ is prefixed to [ > dZu] ‘ten’, we also see the additional segment [b] between the two. As the table below shows, there are a number of other such consonant alternations (highlighted in bold).