this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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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.
Maybe the pronoun "they" works? "I'm wondering if they can..."