Or is it “The monkey for whom I’m wondering if they can see my ears.”

or

“The monkey, regarding whom, I’m wondering if they can see my ears.”

or

“The monkey who I’m wondering if they can see my ears.”

All of them sound stupid.

  • SparrowHawk@feddit.itEnglish
    3·
    15 hours ago

    Generally with animals the “it” pronoun fits best, but i think they phrase itself need reworking, i understand that you can’t today say but i think it’s a difficult way toc phrase it the way toc wrote it.

    Maybe “this is the monkey I suspect is seeing my ears”

    • SeahorseTreble@lemmy.worldOP
      21·
      9 hours ago

      I use “they/them” for any animal/sentient being (whether or not they’re human) rather than “it” in order to avoid objectifying them, but I recognise this is not standard English. I also use “who” instead of “which” (A monkey/dolphin/dog/goat who (…) rather than a monkey which (…), etc) and basically any of the personal pronouns or words you would use for a human rather than an object (or I guess typically nonhuman animals). It’s a deliberate deviation from grammatical rules/traditional language for the sake of aligning with my personal beliefs & ethics about animal rights/vegan stuff. You can just ignore that part though because it’s just a force of habit, I actually forgot that would seem weird since it’s normal to me, the real confusion I had was with the overall sentence structure & how to phrase it; it still doesn’t sound right to me whether you use “it” or “they”.