At the conference I asked an acquaintance from Iran how things were going. He told me he trained a group of Canadians to play music he composed for the revolution. Did he mean the 1979 revolution? No he snapped, “haven’t you heard”? He meant the news from last fall. I said yes of course but when you said the revolution I thought you meant the big one. He said this is bigger. Then explained he taught the musicians to sing in Farsi. I asked how he felt hearing them sing phonetically. He said they understood the meaning because he translated the lyrics which was not exactly an answer to my question but I think he was getting annoyed with me so I asked nothing more. Earlier in April I was at a Passover seder and a lot of it was in Yiddish despite 95% of the people attending not speaking Yiddish. The singer sang the material phonetically. I thought this peculiar. I asked my wife who is a French speaker what she would think listening to a bunch of people sing in French not knowing what they are saying. She disagreed. She thinks it is cool and preserving a language. I get that but at the same time I find it weird. The comedian Stella Walker used to do a bit where she spoke slowly and told the audience everything she is saying she learned on a how to speak English record. I liked how it changed our collective view and anticipation of whatever she next said. It was probably do you like my giraffe?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"