According to Fleck’s thesis, Matsés has nine past tense conjugations, each of which express the source of information (direct experience, inference, or conjecture) as well as how far in the past it was (recent past, distant past, or remote past). Hearsay and history/mythology are also marked in a distinctive way. For expressing certainty, Matsés has a particle ada/-da and a verb suffix -chit which mean something like “perhaps” and another particle, ba, that means something like “I doubt that...” Unfortunately for us, this doesn’t seem more expressive than what English speakers typically say. I’ve only read a small fraction of Fleck’s 1279-page thesis so it’s possible that I missed something. I wrote a lengthier description of the evidential and epistemic modality system in Matsés at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MYCbguxHAZkNGtG2B/matses-are-languages-providing-epistemic-certainty-of?commentId=yYtEWoHQEFuWCehWt.
According to Fleck’s thesis, Matsés has nine past tense conjugations, each of which express the source of information (direct experience, inference, or conjecture) as well as how far in the past it was (recent past, distant past, or remote past). Hearsay and history/mythology are also marked in a distinctive way. For expressing certainty, Matsés has a particle ada/-da and a verb suffix -chit which mean something like “perhaps” and another particle, ba, that means something like “I doubt that...” Unfortunately for us, this doesn’t seem more expressive than what English speakers typically say. I’ve only read a small fraction of Fleck’s 1279-page thesis so it’s possible that I missed something. I wrote a lengthier description of the evidential and epistemic modality system in Matsés at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MYCbguxHAZkNGtG2B/matses-are-languages-providing-epistemic-certainty-of?commentId=yYtEWoHQEFuWCehWt.