I’ve just read this in Bethan Gwanas’s Bryn y Crogwr:
Roedd hi isio cegin cyn i’r babi newydd ’ma gyrraedd, ond dyna fo, mi fydd raid iddi aros.
There’s a couple of things I’m not sure about this sentence. She wanted a kitchen before this new baby arrived, but that’s it…, but I’m a bit unsure about mi fydd raid iddi aros.
From the context, I think it should mean she won’t have to wait: i.e. ˚fydd has been mutated because it’s negative. But, mi would cause it to mutate anyway, wouldn’t it, so how can you tell whether the meaning is negative or positive here?
Secondly, why has ‘rhaid’ soft mutated into ‘raid’?
It can’t be because there’s an implied ‘ei’ before it, because it would be F not M, so there’d be no soft mutation of ‘rh’, would there?
I did look on Google, but both ‘fydd rhaid iddi’ and ‘fydd raid iddi’ seem to be used frequently, and I can’t discern any difference between the contexts. Is it just a standard variation?
No, it’s saying “she will have to wait”. The negative would be ni fydd rhaid iddi aros (slightly more formal) or fydd ddim rhaid iddi aros (less formal). The mutation of bydd>fydd here has indeed occurred because of the mi, not because of a negative.
Yes, it’s quite common in colloquial Welsh to have raid in place of rhaid.
When I wrote the post last night, it was all about the second part of the question (“rhaid” vs “raid”), then this morning I second-guessed myself and started wondering about the fydd and edited the question – the context definitely makes more sense with ‘she won’t’. I should have trusted my first instinct
