Mm - hmm.
and so I went on - line and I uh found a pronunciation dictionary for Italian digits
Mm - hmm.
and just looked at , you know , the number of phones in each one of the digits. Um you know , sort of the canonical way of setting up a  an HMM system is that you use  um three states per phone and um  so then the  the total number of states for a word would just be , you know , the number of phones times three. And so when I did that for the Italian digits , I got a number of states , ranging on the low end from nine to the high end , eighteen. Um.  Now you have to really add two to that because in HTK there 's an initial null and a final null so when they use  uh models that have eighteen states , there 're really sixteen states. They 've got those initial and final null states. And so um   their guess of eighteen states seems to be pretty well matched to the two longest words of the Italian digits , the four and five  which um , according to my , you know , sort of off the cuff calculation , should have eighteen states each.