I know, but that was how it seemed during the lesson! I had this drilled into me in a former attempt to learn Welsh, i think at primary school:
Rydw i
Rwyt ti
Mae e/o/hi
Rydym ni
Rydych chi
Rydyn nhw
So, I spent a large part of Course 1, stopping myself from saying the ‘ry-’ and especially the ‘wyt’ of wyt ti’n. it’s still there if I want to be really formal. so there is ‘mi’ for a positive statement and ‘Ni’ for a negative. It’s just trying to quieten all this stuff to be able to use the language, which is why SSiw is so fantastic. So, I have kind of developed mechanisms to switch this off, when using SSiW and speaking Welsh. When these things do crop up, it does mess with my head a little.
Exactly, why restrict ourselves to one way of saying things!
Yes - both of these are fine really. I would not say myself that the one with the added ddim sounds wrong - in fact I’ve heard it so often that it really sounds pretty normal. Similarly, from further up in the thread: …na fedrwn i…. and …na fedrwn i ddim…, both meaning …that I couldn’t…
Those of you who experience queasiness at the thought of a ‘double negative’…try thinking of it instead as a reinforced negative - common enough actually in many languages (obligatory in Slavonic languages, for example) - and in this sense the two negatives don’t cancel each other out.
They don’t in (admittedly non-standard or dialect) English either - nobody seriously suggests that when someone says ‘I didn’t see nothing’ they actually mean ‘I saw something’, do they? Nobody in their right minds would actually think that was the meaning, would they? No, of course they wouldn’t!
