How do you say something like that?

"There's a thing for which I don't know what it is" "There's a thing where I don't know what it is" "There's a thing that I don't know what is"

or (the one which I hear people say a lot but sounds awkward:) "There's a thing that/which I don't know what it is"?

To be honest they all sound awkward to me to varying degrees

  • ciphershort@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I'm not a grammar expert, but I would say "there's a thing and I don't know what it is" or "there's a thing but I don't know what it is."

  • redimk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    I'm not a grammar expert and English is not my first language but I think I used to say this before and I just ended up taking out the "what it is" and changed it for the thing I'm trying to remember:

    There's a thing that I don't know the name of

    Or

    There's a thing that I don't know how to describe

    Or

    There's a thing whose purpose is a mystery to me

    Is that what you're refering to? Sorry if it's not. I don't think any of the first three examples are correct, or at least they sound really weird to me.

    Please do correct me if there's an English mayor somewhere though!

  • getoffthedrugsdude@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Simpler: I don't know what this/that thing is.

    Basically trying to say: there's this thing that I can't remember the word for/don't know exactly, but I know it exists and need it for context.

    It is awkward, but many dialects compress, forgo, and bastardize sentence structure depending on where you're at.

  • Cid@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    Best sounding recommendation probably depends on context and ‘the thing’:

    There’s a concept I don’t understand.

    There is something in the box I don’t recognize.

    There is a feature of the coffee machine I haven’t figured out yet.

    There’s a Greek word in the original text that I don’t know.

    • Cid@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      To clarify - I think your proposed grammar is valid but the phrasing is uncommon. It’s not a phrase I would expect to hear. Though I would understand the gist of what you’re expressing.

  • pruwyben@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    This is a great question, and it led me down a bit of a rabbit hole. This kind of clause is called a Gapless Relative Clause. The sentence could be written as you have it, or with "I don't know what it is" - the "it" is called the Resumptive Pronoun which are "common in spoken English but are officially ungrammatical".

    The Wikipedia article has a similar example:

    In other cases, the resumptive pronoun is used to work around a syntactic constraint:

    They have a billion dollars of inventory that they don't know where it is.

    In this example, the word it occurs as part of a wh-island. Attempting to extract it gives an unacceptable result:

    *They have a billion dollars of inventory that they don't know where ___ is.

    Here's another great article I found which sums it up well:

    "Resumptives are non-standard, but in such cases they're much better than their gapped counterparts, which people usually find incomprehensible, or at least very hard to comprehend."

    So basically, your original sentence is "unacceptable"/"incomprehensible", but adding "it" would be grammatically incorrect but easier to understand. Best bet is probably to totally rephrase the sentence as others have suggested.

  • kakes@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    The closest phrase I can think of is: "There is a thing of which I do not know."

    Awkward af phrasing, though, as others have stated.

  • sunbrrnslapper@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know what that thing is.

    I don’t know what that thing is for.

    I don’t know what that is.

    Any of these work for what you are trying to say?

  • Evkob@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I'm struggling to think of a context where you'd say this where you couldn't just say "I don't know (about) that thing" or "there's a thing I don't know".

    That there is a thing is kind of implied.

  • asterisk@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I don't think I've come across that before, but I'd say it depends on what is meant:

    • I don't know what that thing is.
    • There is a thing, but I don't know what it is.
    • There is a thing such that I don't know what it is. I.e., I do not know what all things are.

    There may well be some other ones, but I don't know what they might be.

  • jbrains@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    There’s a thing I can’t identify.

    There’s a thing I don’t know about.

    There’s an unfamiliar thing.

    All the formulations you wrote indeed sound either ungrammatical or unwieldy to me.