this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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“The monkey about whose ability to see my ears I’m wondering”.
Part of the issue is that the thing you’re wondering about needs to be a noun, but the verb “can” doesn’t have an infinitive or gerund form (that is, there’s no purely grammatical way to convert it to a noun, like *“to can” or *“canning”). We generally substitute some form of “to be able to”, but it’s not something our brain does automatically.
Also, there’s an implied pragmatic context that some of the other comments seem to be overlooking:
The speaker is apparently replying to a question asking them to indicate one monkey out of several possibilities
The other party is already aware of the speaker’s doubts about a particular monkey's ear-seeing ability
The reason this doubt is being mentioned now is to identify the monkey, not to declare the doubt.