‘Na’ (that) as negative (rhan3/gwers10, cwrs y gog ). ‘Clwyes i na weles ti ddim byd’. ‘I heard you didn’t hear anything’ . However, ‘Clywes i na welodd o hi’ ??? ‘I heard that he didn’t see her’. Would ‘‘Clywes i na welodd o ddim hi’ be wrong? After all, ‘Clywes i na ddes ti ddim adre’ neithiwr’ (I heard she didn’t come home last night) follows, to my confusion. Is ‘na’ a negative, as not that, an abbreviated ‘nad’, as in ‘Pam nad wyt ti adre’?’.
Sian D.
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‘Clywes i na welodd o ddim hi’ sounds a bit strange to me, ‘clywes i na welodd o ddim ohoni’ or ‘clywes i na welodd o mohoni’ is what sounds better to me. Normally, you don’t put a definite noun, incl a pronoun, without ‘o’ after dim - in case you are looking for a pattern. By definite noun I mean something specific like ‘y gath’, btw.
You wouldn’t be likely to hear exactly that example, because it’s just simpler and easier to say ‘na welodd o hi’ - but it wouldn’t surprise me in longer sentences to hear something like ‘clywes i na welodd o ddim beth oedd hi’n gwneud’.
In terms of technical correctness, it’s probably a redundancy, but it makes my eyes water, so you’d better wait until one of our grammar gods comes online…
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To my Southern ears, “Clywais i na welodd o hi” sounds fine to me because, as far as I’m aware, the ‘na’ works as the negative bit, so you don’t need ‘dim’.
Likewise, I’d probably say “I heard she didn’t come home last night” as “Clywais i na ddaeth hi adre neithiwr”.
As I said, I’m not doing the Northern course, so I hope that helps rather than hinders!
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