Part 1: Four sources, one stack

The doctrine lives in manual ch16; here is the working set, once, and then we practice.

All four are optional. An unmarked sentence is a plain assertion; a marked one tells the listener where to direct their trust, and their questions.

The founding pair

The whole system is audible in two lines from the invitation itself, identical but for one syllable:

pheralu to hi lepa.
rain PST DIR fall.
(Rain fell; I saw it myself.)

pheralu to ti lepa.
rain PST REP fall.
(Rain fell; someone told me.)

Say them aloud until the swap feels physical. Nothing about the rain changed. What changed is you: your relation to the fact, disclosed in passing, at no cost to the sentence's shape. This is the entire trick of the system: the evidence rides in the verb phrase like tense does, and like tense, it becomes unconscious with use.

Where they stand

Evidentials live in Slot 1, and Slot 1 has a fixed order: Tense > Aspect > Voice > Evidentiality > Modality > Negation. The evidential stands after tense, aspect, and voice, and before modality and negation. You do not need the whole stack often, but you need its order to be reflex:

shia to hi wepu.
3SG PST DIR go.
(They left; I watched them go.)

pheralu so ho shua.
rain FUT ASSUM come.
(Rain will probably come.)

shia to ke ma wepu.
3SG PST INFER NEG go.
(They did not leave — I infer it.)

The order never bends, and it earns a moment's attention because the temptation runs the other way: uncertainty feels like it should come first, and English says "probably it will rain" with the hedge out front. Phi files the hedge where it belongs: after the time, before the denial. Tense first, then the evidence, then modality, then negation, then the deed. Announce everything; deliver once.

The unmarked default

Most sentences carry no evidential, and that is not laziness: it is register. mia thia sano. (I know you.) needs no source. Ordinary talk trusts its speakers. The particles come out when the source is the message: news, testimony, disagreement, care with another's inner life. The primer's news chapter spends all four in one afternoon, because news is exactly where knowing-how matters:

suliwa mua phitura nai. mia suliwa hi nila.
snake LOC well be. 1SG snake DIR see.
(A snake is at the well. I saw it with my own eyes.)

One child, one snake, one hi, and the whole household will spend the rest of this pamphlet knowing about it in four different ways.

Drill: hear the stack

Cover the glosses. For each line, name the slot of every particle before the verb, in order, aloud.

1. mia to hi nila.
2. lo mia so ho kamo.
3. shia to si ke thalo.
4. thia to ti ma wepu.

Answers: 1 past + direct. 2 future + assumptive. 3 past + imperfective + inferential. 4 past + reportative + negation. If any answer took longer than the sentence did, run the drill again tomorrow; the stack should resolve at reading speed before you go on.