We were talking about how the dinosaurs became extinct in my Honors class this evening. We read some paragraphs in our writing book, and filled in some blanks from a listening exercise about various theories of what killed the dinosaurs: giant volcanos, asteriods, or more gradual failure to adapt to climate change. We discussed some more, and then I had them write some summary of the different ideas. I said, summarize how the reading and the lecture disagree about how the dinosaurs died.
I picked up one student’s essay, and she had written, “Dinosaurs were killed by a theory.”
I don’t know why, but I found this quite amusing, and took far too long trying to imagine how this might have worked. Perhaps the dinosaurs were more sentient than we realize, and they developed some cultural trait that led to self-destructive behavior. For example, they had a theory that if they dug very deep holes, they could find true spiritual happiness. So they dug deeper and deeper holes, until finally they reached the earth’s magma, which erupted and destroyed them all.
This would be the sort of theory that killed the dinosaurs.
Meanwhile, I wonder… it may in fact be perfectly OK to say the Korean equivalent, because the relationships (agent, topic, actor, recipient-of-action, etc.) between the noun phrases in Korean sentences are clarified by the endings on those words, not by the inherent valences of the verbs, as in English (and largely, most other Indo-European languages, as I understand it). This is one of the linguistic differences that seems to cause so much confusion to Korean English learners, and why they are always saying things like “The dinosaurs died the asteroid,” when they mean “The asteroid killed the dinosaurs.” They know what they mean, they just don’t get that English verbs have these semantic valences that must be filled correctly.
That’s my theory, anyway. I’ll try not to let it kill me.
[daily log: walking, 5 km]