4min chapter

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Conlangery #18: Mood

Conlangery Podcast

CHAPTER

How to Use Modal Verbs in English and Dutch

Each language tends to carve out things its own little way. English and Dutch both do something that I consider a little bit perverse, but apparently it happens all over is it has some verbs that can be used both for modality And for evidentiality yay So for example in English must you can say you must be here at 12 Deontic modal Or you could step outside your front door and see that the sidewalk is wet and you can say it must have rained That is a suppositional evidential. This sort of hanky-panky between mood and evidence is apparently fairly common across different languages.

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