Monday Methods | Limitations of Expertise

[u/Daeres]

Welcome to this, the... slightly delayed ninth installment of this weekly thread. I hope everyone had an excellent Christmas and New Year! This week's prompt is, accordingly, colourful and sugary with awkwardly dangled reindeer antlers.

How do you draw up the limitations to your expertise?

This question has, I think, additional resonance on AskHistorians because we have to go through this process when it comes to getting flaired. That's also an example of where there's additional concerns- a character limit, and making sure that as many people as possible have the best understanding of precise areas of knowledge, whilst also making the label understandable.

But there are also other occasions in which you essentially have to state, aloud or in text, something resembling boundaries to your expertise. Imagine having your expertise displayed on a website, or written down as a onscreen caption for an interview, or being introduced to people. Even just explaining to friends and family.

Maybe you want to talk about the idea of what constitutes expertise, or maybe you find that relatively straightforward and want to talk about the process of explaining expertise to other people, or maybe you want to talk about how this works in terms of multidisciplinary approaches. There's lots of different aspects of this that can be responded to, I think.

Here are the upcoming (and previous) questions, and next week's question is this: What is complexity, and when it is desirable?

[u/DonaldFDraper]

Language. Thankfully my Era has a lot of sources that were published (both of the "important" people and the journals and diaries of the "common" people), but it's limited by language. Worse, quality histories are limited to language yet Anglophone historiography which tends to punish the French for supporting Napoleon and demonizes Napoleon as if he is literally Hitler. As a result, I've had a very quick lesson on how to read history in Introductions and Reviews to not waste money or time.

Articles are not as bad, there are a lot of well written articles that are as close to unbiased as possible, but most of those focus on military matters.

It really is curious to see how for two hundred years, Britis historians (and worse pop historians) dominate an area of history simply because of language.

I'm in the process of learning French (and Spanish, but that's a family matter).

[u/yodatsracist → u/DonaldFDraper]

There's a Turkish saying:

Dil, dile değmeden dil öğrenilmez.

Which translates to:

Without touching your tongue to another tongue you can't learn a [foreign] tongue/language.

If you can't get read between the lines, get a Francophone boy/girlfriend.

Luckily French gets way easier. Its hardest part (in terms of reading) is developing lower level vocabulary, but once you get to a high enough level, there are just a lot of cognates and word order and language logic are very similar other than a few tenses that take a minute to get the handle of. Production is a little bit harder when it comes to the subjunctive (I heard the Spanish subjunctive is even worse), but it's a language that gets much easier very quickly. I dated a Quebecoise for a while and whenever she grasped for a word in English, it was almost always a cognate (things like "ruse"). Just start trying to read newspapers as soon as possible and you'll cross over fairly quickly and realize it's really doable. If you can, try to move to a Francophone area once you have a strong base. Things just snap together much faster when you're speaking every day. I love Montreal (though it's easy to slip into Anglophone circles there), but Paris, Brussels, Dakar, Quebec City, etc. are also lovely I hear.

[u/lngwstksgk → u/yodatsracist]

Careful you're not taking Québécois dialectal peculiarities as standard--their syntax is very much similar to English now, but this is not the case with European dialects. They're also highly familiar with English, even if not fluent or even able to speak it, and it's pretty common to hear even a "pur laine" speaker pop a few English terms in now and again just for style or because it occured to them first.

Reading French is also an added challenge, as they have a fossilized literary past tense that's only used in writing.

[u/yodatsracist → u/lngwstksgk]

1) Sorry, I meant syntax is similar to English in a very broad way! Like, it's not like Turkish or Arabic or Chinese.

2) The passé simple is a hassle to learn but it's ultimately just a week or two of study. I feel like the conditional and the imparfait are actually harder (especially in production). German, for example, has a similar written-only past tense that I found harder (since it's far more irregular).

3) I just think Quebec (well, Montreal) is a much more pleasant place to be than anywhere I've been in Metropolitan France and, while there are a lot of bilingual people, one of the most interesting things is that in general people will continue speaking in any language you start with (at least in my experience). It's easy to speak only English but it's also easy to speak a lot of French every day. I think the Québécois undoubtedly use more English borrowings but that's also just how French is spoken today! I tried to find a pure French version of "geek", for example, and my Parisienne friend insisted that the only natural sounding way to say this in French was "nerd".

4) Québécois French sounds nicer than Parien French and I like to stick it in the eye of everyone who has that smug sense of Metropolitan French superiority.