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
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.”
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
