Well, Lyonel Perabo mon vieux, this is going to be an unimaginative answer, but thanks for asking.
- University education: Bachelor of Electrical Engineering
- Well, no electricity, so that’s irrelevant. Good, I hated engineering.
- University education: Bachelor of Computer Science
- … No computers either. And too much damn competition from all the other time travelling geeks.
- University education: Masters in Cognitive Science
- Dude, you can’t get a job with that now
- University education: Doctorate in Linguistics
- Quite apart from the woe is me of Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your personal experience with obtaining a linguistics degree? …
Well, let’s think about it. 1516, Crete and Cyprus were both under Venetian rule. They were colonial outposts, but the Renaissance was starting to make an impression there: there were Petrarchan sonnets in Cypriot, and literary societies in Crete. (The best of Cretan literature was still a century down the road.)
If I was a city dweller and/or Catholic, I’d have access to Renaissance learning. I’d probably write even worse Latin poetry than I write here to Michael Masiello, and I might get a gig in Venice. Aldus Manutius has just died, but I hear they’re still hiring Classical Greek proofreaders.
If I were a villager and Orthodox, there would be two paths for someone through book learning. The clergy would be one, and I think my chanting would be passable, as demonstrated here.
The other would be as a notary. I could have abysmal spelling in Greek, codeswitching with Italian for every third word. And five centuries down the road, some poor shmuck working in a digital library of Ancient and Mediaeval Greek would be tweaking their morphological analyser, to deal with the mess I’d bequeathed them.
I’m going to miss you, Manolis Varouchas.