'kindness'). Syllables with short vowels bear a single toneme, but those with long vowels have one toneme for each mora of the vowel, making for a total of four contours: high-high, , 'bark' high-low, , 'point' low-high, , 'snake' low-low, , 'spread of cedars' Morphology Nouns Almost every noun in Plains Apache can optionally take a pronominal prefix to indicate its possessor. These prefixes are as follows (some of the prefixes have multiple forms in free variation; in these cases, the more common variant is listed first). Some of these forms require further explanation. The indefinite third person may be used when the possessor is unknown, and is similar in meaning to 'someone's' (e.g. , 'a hoop owned by some unknown person'). The fourth person is reserved for possessors who are deemed to be in some way remote from the speaker, usually socially; compare , which would refer to a hoop belonging to someone who the speaker is familiar with and interacts with frequently and informally, and , used for someone who the speaker has a purely formal relationship with and does not know well. The noun bases to which these prefixes can be added are of one of three classes: primary, compound, and nominalized. Primary noun bases are mostly monosyllabic stems such as , 'charcoal', though a few of them seem to consist of an unidentified prefix and a stem (e.g. , 'antelope'), and some others are simply unanalyzable polysyllables, perhaps originally onomatopoeic (e.g. , 'magpie'). Many of the stem nouns have different forms depending on their morphological context, with an absolute form when unpossessed, an inflected form when possessed, and a combining form in compounds or nominalized phrases. The formation of these is generally irregular, although certain patterns do exist, such as initial , , and becoming , , and when inflected (e.g. > , 'his language') and a final V:h becoming Vʔ (e.g. > , 'his feather'). Some stem nouns, especially those referring to body parts, are inalienably possessed, i.e. they cannot occur without a possessor prefix (e.g. , 'his lips', but not ). In these cases the indefinite prefix must be used if one wishes to talk about the object without specifying the possessor (, 'lips'). In order to indicate alienable possession of these nouns, an additional possessor prefix can be attached before the indefinite prefix, yielding forms like , 'his fat (which comes from the