Asklemmy

44615 readers

913 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Is this grammatically correct: "The monkey who I'm wondering if can see my ears." (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by SeahorseTreble@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

26 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Or is it "The monkey for whom I'm wondering if they can see my ears."

"The monkey, regarding whom, I'm wondering if they can see my ears."

"The monkey who I'm wondering if they can see my ears."

All of them sound stupid.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] jbrains@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The phrase "I'm wondering if... can..." needs a noun or pronoun between "if" and "can". As soon as you try to remove that (by moving it out to "The monkey who..."), the phrase stops being grammatical. We'd understand you, but it would require significant effort to parse the sentence. That seems to be what makes this sound strange, no matter what we try to do with it.

I don't know whether other languages can do this, but English can't.

[–] SeahorseTreble@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Maybe the pronoun "they" works? "I'm wondering if they can..."