a mountain roads scholar

 “What is a mountain roads scholar?” you ask.  You didn’t ask?   But you were curious, right?  Let’s pretend.  My favorite pastime is walking the Rocky Mountains with a shoulder bag of books to read and drafts to revise.  Responses vary.  Some stare in disbelief, subconsciously leaning away from the crazy man, while others find it an intriguing idea.   I read, learn, study languages, correct papers, write, revise, and enjoy gorgeous scenery, all while exercising (walking in the mountains, thus, a roads scholar vs. a Rhodes scholar).  Otherwise, life is too short to get much done.  If reading and learning only happen while sitting at a desk, then one ends up being a wimpy indoor desk scholar.  However, I love learning and I also love walking in the mountains, so I combine them into study-hiking, a strategy to do both and get more done in our few days on earth. True, upon returning from the mountains, I have to sit at a computer awhile to input changes, but I much prefer walking to sitting, and much of the thinking, studying, reading, and revising can be done while walking relatively smooth roads in my favorite place, the mountains. People pay big bucks for an office window with a view of the mountains, but my office is the mountains—besides my home office. If you like learning/reading and walking/exercising, try it, and get twice as much life out of the same hours. (See at http://anecdotes2antidotes.blogspot.com)

Brian D. Stubbs—linguist, Uto-Aztecanist, Semiticist, author, composer, newspaper columnist, and wimpy mountain-man—teaches ESL (a branch of linguistics), English composition, and Introduction to Linguistics at Utah State University’s Blanding Campus.  Of his four books, Uto-Aztecan Comparative Vocabulary is the reference book of the field. The published result of a 30-year effort is five times the size of the last book published in that field 40 years ago. While teaching English (research writing), he found books on “how to write a research paper” to be about as interesting as a phone book. So he decided to write one that is at least more interesting.  Morsels for the Mind features several humorous essays, 10 sample research papers presenting “useful” information actually relevant to life, but with enough appendices on punctuation, documentation, and other minutia sufficiently boring to qualify it as an English textbook.  He also wrote a short comic novel entitled Paradise Lost and Found based on the second of his six musicals.

A linguist is a language scientist. Within linguistics are many specialties. Applied linguists teach English as a Second Language (ESL) or other languages (see “Subconscious Mind’s Role in Language Acquisition”). Historical linguists research how languages change over time, often specializing in a specific language family. A language family is a group of related languages descended from a common parent language.

A Uto-Aztecanist is a historical linguist specializing in the Uto-Aztecan language family. Uto-Aztecan is a language family of about 30 related languages descended from an ancient language that linguists call Proto-Uto-Aztecan. The name Uto-Aztecan derives from the Utes in the north to the Aztecs in the south. About half the languages are in the U.S. Southwest (Hopi, Ute, Shoshoni, Pima, and several in southern California) and half are in Mexico (Nahuatl/Aztec, Tarahumara, and a dozen others).  Brian’s  book Uto-Aztecan: A Comparative Vocabulary pulls together groups of related words in the descendant languages, that is, the words that are descended from a single ancient word.  Each group of related words is called a cognate set. The book also explains how the sounds changed in various languages and branches from ancient times to the present and also features 2700 cognate sets (vs. the 514 cognate sets of the last book published on comparative Uto-Aztecan linguistics), with a bibliography listing several hundred books. If it were double-spaced in 12-point font, it would be a 1200-page research paper. In short, it is a significant advancement in the field. Below are excerpts from the introduction. (See his Uto-Aztecan website is http://uto-aztecan.org)

A Semiticist is a linguist specializing in the Semitic language family. Brian has studied Hebrew/Canaanite, Arabic, Aramaic, and Syriac.  Akkadian (which later divided and became Assyrian and Babylonian), the Ethiopic languages, and the Old South Arabian dialects are also Semitic languages.  Brian has also studied Egyptian, which is distantly related to Semitic in the larger Afro-Asiatic language family.

As a composer and playwright, Brian has written the script and composed the music for six musicals, in addition to other compositions.  In contrast, Rogers and Hammerstein musicals had Hammerstein as the writer and Rogers was the composer. Fiddler on the Roof was written by three people: a lyricist, scriptwriter, and composer.  Brian’s musicals are generally light and fun. 

Life with Mr., Jr., and Some Misses of Communication is a comedy about young love and two neighboring families prone to humorous miscommunications. Jasper the Cowboy comes to town, asks for Silvia, but converses with her Grandpa in her absence. Upon discovering the 10-year age difference, Grandpa cautions that “Some would call that robbing the cradle.” Jasper’s answer—“Don’t worry, we’ll fill it back up again”—typifies the humor throughout.

Paradise Lost and Found features 7 tourists on a cruise with a captain and a crew boy. The  crazies on the cruise do their inevitable shipwreck on an island where some want to be rescued while others say paradise is finally found. While the tourists are on Cannibal Island, their futile attempts at shark-fishing, substantive thought, coconut-picking, and romantic realization provide more comedy than results … until the native cannibals appear, at which point their inability to do anything right is once again reconfirmed. The sequel, Paradise Lost and Found II, continued the inanity.  

Mr. Scrumple’s Opus is something of a spoof on Mr. Holland’s Opus, the story of a teacher who makes a wonderful difference in students’ lives. In contrast, Mr. Scrumple (played by Brian) is a bumbling English teacher, apparently doing no one any good, besides being bombarded with excuses and humorous happenings, in contrast to Shane Brewer, the math teacher, who has it all together. They take turns occasionally coming up with profound insights relative to education and their respective spheres of humanities and math/science.

Brian was asked to write Blanding’s Centennial Pageant, resulting in Great! Expectations! which depicts the history of Blanding with music and humor attached. The title is a play on words of Charles Dicken’s famous novel, of course, but with different punctuation and thus a different meaning (so punctuation is important): That’s just great! You and your expectations! So I too should be weighed down by your unreasonable expectations? How about we get the important work done? You have expectations that keep you from being happy. Shed the burdening expectations, relax, do your part and be grateful others do theirs.

Has Beens, Wannabes, and Rather Nots has a Santa Claus-looking Kris Gardner bringing Christmas cheer in June to a small town as he tracks down a pair of non-identical fraternal twin grandsons, whose runaway mother gave them up for adoption when they were infants. The twins happen to go to the same high school, but do not know they are brothers and become enemies (the story of the world). However, their Grandpa Chris figures out how to become involved in both of their lives by becoming the janitor of their high school.  That strand weaves through other comic dimensions of plot.

Newspaper columnist is another of his genres.  His column is “Anecdotes as Antidotes to Wrench Us from Our Ruts” and sample columns are shared at his blogsite—(http://anecdotes2antidotes.blogspot.com) —where the mountain man mystery is also explained in the first column.