Modal MD without Mood — proposal

Proposal: wait for the decision on #1118 and #1155. Until then keep the EWT custom: MD — VerbForm=Fin without Mood, Number and Person.

Options and why not now.

• Mood=Pot/Nec/Cnd in FEATS, as the universal Mood.md advises and as auxiliary functions are recorded in data.json (can Mood=Pot, must Mood=Nec, would Mood=Cnd):
  • informative;
  • but the en FEATS registry allows only Imp|Ind|Sub, so export to 2.18 and to ud-next would be invalid;
  • #1118 leans toward treating this as lexical meaning, not a paradigm cell.
• Mood=Ind on modals: would remove the validator warning, but as a claim of "indicative mood" for might, would it is false.
• Remove VerbForm=Fin (#1233: an "inherent" feature) — also undecided.

Why this does no harm. The modal meaning in mova is visible from the lemma anyway: the auxiliary registry has the function of each of the 16 lemmas. A clause-level feature ("possibility", "necessity") for RAG can be derived from the lemma without writing it into FEATS.

Evidence from the data. EWT 2.18: MD with VerbForm=Fin without Mood — 4049. The same in GUM (2956), GENTLE, PUD and LittlePrince. The validator gives a verbform-fin-without-mood warning for each such token, but not an error.

When to come back. When #1118 is closed or when _en/feat/Mood.md changes in the snapshot. The snapshot-vs-release comparison should be repeated before 01.11.2026.

Origin. Modal MD: VerbForm=Fin without Mood; #1118, #1155, #1233.

Mova decides.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/dialects/mova/seeds/modal-mood/