Two modal particles in Basque display separate syntactic statuses in eastern dialects, namely the evidential omen and the epistemic ote. Despite works on their syntax, no attempt to explain the relation (and development) between the two statuses has been put forward. After concluding that analyses on German and Italian MPs (Grosz, 2005;Coniglio, 2007;Cardinaletti, 2011) are not appropriate for omen/ote, I demonstrate that the recent proposal of Lakarra ( 2019), who postulates that MPs derive from verbs, accounts not only for the canonical behaviour of those particles, but also for their behaviour close to weak adverbs.