The Daily Omnivore

In grammar, case changes what a noun, adjective, or pronoun does in a sentence. It is a set of forms which depend on the syntax (how the words go together). Case is an example of inflection, which is often an affix, a part of a word that is added to other words, that signals a grammatical relationship. Long ago, Old English used several cases, but Modern English does not normally use cases except in pronouns.

In Latin, nouns pack several ideas into one word. Nouns must be masculine (Latin: ends in -us), feminine (ends in -a) or neutral (ends in -um). Also, adjectives must agree with the nouns by changing their endings. English is one of the few European languages that does not usually have gender for nouns.

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Flâneur [flah-neyr] is a French term for a type of urban male ‘stroller,’ ‘lounger,’ ‘saunterer,’ or ‘loafer.’ Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society, for an entertainment from the observation of the urban life. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier.

The flâneur was first a literary type from 19th-century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. Drawing on the work of Charles Baudelaire who described the flâneur in his poetry and 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ Walter Benjamin promoted 20th-century scholarly interest in the flâneur as an emblematic archetype of urban, modern (even modernist) experience.

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Linear B is the earliest known form of written Greek. It is a Mycenaean syllabic script that predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries, the earliest known examples dating to around 1450 BCE. It is adapted from the earlier Linear A, an undeciphered script perhaps used for writing the Minoan language. Linear B, found mainly in the palace archives at Knossos, Kydonia, Pylos, Thebes, and Mycenae, disappeared with the fall of Mycenaean civilization (1750-1050 BCE) during the Late Bronze Age collapse. The succeeding period, known as the Greek Dark Ages, provides no evidence of the use of writing.

Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by English architect and self-taught linguist Michael Ventris based on the research of American classicist Alice Kober. It is the only Bronze Age Aegean script to have been deciphered, with Linear A, Cypro-Minoan, and Cretan hieroglyphic remaining unreadable.

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