> It is strange that we can't say "I have yes apples" otherwise.
You do see ungrammatical "yes" applied sometimes when people are stumped as to how to indicate the opposite of a negative sentence.
It is not strange in general that certain things are, for no apparent reason, impossible to say. That occurs in every language. English modal auxiliaries, for example, do not have non-finite forms, so in many sentences it is mandatory to replace modal can with lexical to be able [to...]
