Part 5: Slot 1: evidence and modality

Ranks four and five are the speaker's own entries in the record: how I know and how the world constrains. Both are optional; both are one-per-clause; and both have deep literature elsewhere: this part keeps only what the system needs from them.

Evidence: rank four, one source, the evidentiality pamphlet's territory

hi witnessed, ke inferred, ti told, ho assumed. All drilled to reflex in the evidentiality pamphlet, from the snake at the well to the honest journal. The slot facts, restated once: evidentials stand after tense, aspect, and voice, and before modality; one source per clause (two sources are two sentences, the two-sentence habit); and, by the newest ruling, an unmarked sentence claims no source at all. It is a plain assertion, the system's resting state; hi exists precisely so that witnesshood is a claim you make, with the accountability that follows, never a default you drift into.

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

Modality: po and na

po marks the possible and the able; na the necessary. They are the fifth rank, after any evidential, before any negation, and they compose with everything below them:

mia po shonela.
1SG POT learn.
(I can learn.)

mia ki na kamo.
1SG PFV NEC arrive.
(I must have arrived.)

That second line, from ch15 §4, repays a slow read: aspect then modality, a completed event under a necessity: the epistemic must of someone reasoning from a timetable. The ranks compose; the meanings multiply; nothing changes shape.

The ruled negations

ma follows the modals, and canon fixes each pair's reading; order never bends, scope is ruled per pair:

• po ma V means cannot: the possibility is denied.
• na ma V means must not: the necessity is to refrain.
• Need not (the absence of obligation) is never made by reordering. It is the freedom periphrasis: thia lila wepu ralu nai. — you are free as to going. Absence of obligation is stated as presence of freedom, which is not a workaround but a worldview.

The metta text is the register lesson for this whole rank: one na in the entire text, aimed at the practitioner, and twenty-three wishes: necessity spent once, where it was owed, and hope everywhere else. Modals are claims about the world's constraints; Phi's texts spend them the way its counting pamphlet spends exactness: only where they are true and owed.

Drill: the honest layer

For each situation, add only what honesty requires, choosing source, modal, both, or neither:

1. You hear rain on the roof right now. Say that it rains.
2. The path is wet; you did not see it fall. Say that it rained.
3. You are able to help, and you say so.
4. Rules of the household: one must give water to the garden daily. Say your obligation.
5. It is the rain season, nothing more. Say that rain will come.
6. Your friend cannot come. The river is too high. Say it.

Answers: 1 pheralu lepa. You are both in it; a pedigree would be comedy (unmarked, and claiming nothing). 2 pheralu to ke lepa. 3 mia po naphe. 4 mia wei muila phialu na loa. 5 pheralu so ho shua. 6 melu po ma shua. The possibility denied, which says nothing against the friend, only against the river. That is po ma's gentleness: it locates the impossibility in the world.