My grammar book by Christine Jones says that an implicit question is introduced by “a”, as in “dw I ddim yn gwybod a fydd hi’n braf”. This translates the English “whether”. But SSIW and several other places I have seen uses"ai" as in “ai eich plant chi ydy rheina?”
Can anyone help with this?
Sure. ai is a “particle” with the function of marking the following as a question, and it is used when the question doesn’t start with a verb – in other words if it is in an emphatic word order.
It’s not strictly needed in speech, but it prepares the listener that the following is a question, in case it wouldn’t be clear from the intonation alone.
“ai” is the question particle if what follows is not in the standard order, but in the focused order,
e.g. if you take a statement like “She’s going to the shop” and you make a question like - “Do you know if she’s going to the shop?” - then it becomes Wyt ti’n gwybod a yw/ydy hi’n mynd i’r siop (Do you know if/whether she’s going to the shop?)
But if you ask in a way that’s clumsy in English - “Do you know if it’s to the SHOP she’s going?”, i.e., to the SHOP rather than somewhere else, in Welsh you need to put the focus on SHOP, so you get Wyt ti’n gwybod ai i’r siop mae hi’n mynd?
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