Athabaskan languages have extremely complex and productive morphology based overwhelmingly on verbal roots. There are very few basic nouns. Monosyllabic noun stems are either unanalyzable, and therefore presumptively old, or, where analyzable, reflect very old derivational processes. It has therefore been suggested that they can provide a window into the deeper layers of culture history. However, this project has not to my knowledge previously been carried out. In this paper I report on an analysis of the monosyllabic noun stems of Carrier, one of the few languages of the region for which really extensive lexical information is available. Approximately 360 monosyllabic noun stems are attested, representing about 10% of those phonotactically possible. In general, the monosyllables do reflect what are probably very old aspects of the culture.

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