2018 Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) California State University, Fresno November 30‒December 2, 2018 Number Beasts and Numerals in Altaic Languages Penglin Wang (wangp@cwu.edu) Central Washington University When it comes to ancient times, people’s need and ability to use numerals for counting and calculation have come a long way when compared to modern times. Students of numeracy have been exploring various cognitive processes in which early people acquired their numerals. Menninger (1969:122f) gives invaluable insights into the way early people drew on their environment for symbols to indicate quantities by presenting the theory of ‘number beasts,’ with which people counted across languages, be it tadpole in Egyptian, scorpion in Chinese, ant in Greek, and ox in Hebrew. As the reverse of the process, Avestan baevar ‘beaver’ came to mean ‘10,000’ from these abundant animals. The formation of numerals was recurring processes found throughout the Inner Asia culture areas; so, too, was the category of ‘number beasts,’ which was responsible for the correlation between certain numerals and animals in areally or genealogically connected languages. Based on Menninger’s theorization I propose the etymological origin of Mongolic harban (< *hasba-n) ‘ten’ and Turkic yüz ‘hundred’ from Iranian aspa (Persian asb, Old Persian aspa, Avestan aspa, Kurdish hasp) ‘horse’ and yuz ‘leopard,’ respectively. I argue that since the ancient period of language contact between Altaic and Indo-European in Inner Asia, ‘number beasts’ had become instrumental for herders and hunters to fill in then some vacant numeral slots – at least in Altaic when their speakers interacted with those of Iranian during the Scythian or early Xiongnu era in what is nowadays Mongolia. This cognitive process was prompted by the lucky combination of the transcontinental flow of ideas and lexemes resulted from contact and the constant human interaction with animals, domesticated or wild. In the case of the correlation between the horse and decade numeration, we need to scrutinize the decimal organization of horsemen in Xiongnu at the decimal bottom gradiently up to the myriad summit recorded in some detail by Chinese historians (Shiji 110.2891, Hanshu 94.3751) two millennia ago. To the Xiongnu there was no difference between military and civilian administration based on the decimal system. Given a set of ten horsemen with their ten horses integrated into a grass-root unit, presumably the contemporary people had been accustomed to equating the set with a decimal numeration. In the transfer from Iranian aspa to Mongolic harban, Mongolic speakers made two phonetic modifications conducive to their phonotactics. One is rhotacism in the postvocalic position to render an obstruent consonant, especially a sibilant, as a trill. That is why the Mongolic trill corresponds to the Iranian sibilant. The other is the habitual adding to the root harb(a)- the suffixal nasal -n, which is the typical ending of cardinal numerals in Classical Mongolian except qoyar ‘two’ ended with -r. As for the Turkic yüz (Turkish and Uyghur yüz) ‘hundred,’ it could be correlated with Iranian yuz ‘leopard, cheetah’ as is reminiscent of Turkic qunduz (*qund(u)-z) ‘beaver’ and Mongolic miŋǰin (miŋ-ǰin) ‘beaver’ connected with Old English hund ‘hundred’ and Old Turkic miŋ ‘1000,’ respectively (Wang 2018:78). (496 words)