Asking questions

[helenlindsay]

I asked Aran a similar question about gofyn + wrth under the Tiny Questions with quick answers thread and he responded:

@aran

I think ‘gofyn i’ would be the technically correct construction there, and in an ideal world it might be one we should standardise throughout the course - but you will hear ‘gofyn wrth’ from time to time,

and Gareth King confirmed this:

@garethrking

Yes…it’s meant to be gofyn i… You do hear gofyn wrth… sometimes, and I imagine that this is by analogy (though wrong) with dweud wrth… since both are verbs of saying. But for gofyn I would advise i. And certainly a command like ‘Ask her!’ in Welsh would definitely be Gofyn iddi!, not Gofyn wrthi.

I have also asked one of my tutors about how much should be included between the dweud and the wrth, and she said, everything(!), even if it makes it a really long sentence before you find out who was involved in the conversation! I don’t know if the same thing applies to gofyn.

I should think it’s all fairly flexible in conversation, after all the person who was told something might be more important than what was actually said - you might want to get that information out first! Also, in my case, where I am likely to forget the wrth after dweud, I like to get it in early in the sentence!