Thanks to all who responded to my previous ‘a few minor queries’; this is a most helpful forum. One more point I’m curious about:
I note that while ‘I speak’ is ‘dw i’n siarad’ and ‘he speaks’ is ‘ma fe’n siarad’, ‘you speak’ is simply ‘ti’n siarad’, and ‘I have spoken’ is ‘ti wedi siarad’ or ‘ti ’di siarad’. Is ‘ti’ the only personal pronoun that lets you dispense altogether with the auxiliary and just use the verb noun i.e. you can’t, I presume, just say ‘i’n siarad’ or ‘fe’n siarad’? If so, why should ‘ti’ be privileged in this way – could it be because the initial t is a stronger sound that is considered to kind of assimilate a preceding ‘wyt’? Just curious.
I was taught in school to use ‘wyt ti’, My understanding is that the auxiliary is dropped in speech, presumably because the t is quite a hard sound so not mistaken.
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A number of people would suggest that the wyt still exists as a vestigial slight intake of breath before the ti - making a barely audible uh sound.
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You will hear, colloquially, “fi’n siarad” and things like “ni angen”. “Chi” can be used this way. It all depends how formal you want to be. I’d never write “Fi’n gwybod” if I was writing to someone formally but I would in a text to a friend.
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Also, the “wyt” is pretty much entirely reserved for questions now. I often read “rwyt ti” but I don’t tend to hear it.
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I used to assume that the “wyt” form was only used for questions, but when I started reading Welsh, it appeared that that was not the case (at least in written Welsh). Although, as you suggest, “rwyt ti” seems to be the more common written form (even in books that contain a lot of very colloquial Welsh, like the “Blodwen Jones” books. Took a little getting used to, did that.