The first annual Cliopatra Blogging Awards have been announced. (Unfortunately my role as a judge didn’t include an air ticket to America, so I’m slightly behind the times here. The history blog of the year is Blog Them Out of the Stone Age. Love the title – not so keen of the white on black text … hint, hint!

Find all of the other winners through the link above – there are some brilliant blogs there, including the best new blog BibliOdyssey, which was one I had a hand in chosing. Even if you think history “isn’t your thing”, go and look at the pictures – they are gorgeous, and fascinating. Looking at it today there are illustrations from Sir Walter Scott novels, primitive 17th-century hand grenades and Lebanese art posters.

China must be the part of the world where the greatest number of languages and dialects are in danger of extinction. (Although as I wrote last year Nushu, the special women’s language, is going strong with the encouragement of tourism.

You might think there is only Mandarin and Cantonese, but I believe, after talking to Chinese when travelling there, that there are, or were, many many more. A man in Guilin was most insulted by the suggestion that he might speak Cantonese, or Mandarin, as his native language. Of course he spoke Guilinese.

Losing languages doesn’t just mean losing sounds, but also losing world-views, as is revealed by the metaphors in different languages. We say “stop and smell the flowers”. In Cantonese the equivalent is apparently “Drink a cup of tea and eat a bun.”

But the language is losing out to Mandarin.

Such a pity to lose the richness. More Cantonese: “the slang for getting a parking ticket … is ‘I ate beef jerky,’ probably because Chinese beef jerky is thin and rectangular, like a parking ticket. And teo bao (literally ‘too full’) describes someone who is uber-trendy, so hip he or she is going to explode.”

… if you were thinking “oh I must but the Observer on the Weekend for its new “classy” women’s magazine, you’re probably going to be disappointed: the promotional front page consists of an apparently naked model with a strategically placed expensive handbag, with a body shape unlike that of any real woman you’ve ever seen. And the subject? Body hair.

And more depressing news from Australia, in the wholly political campaign against RU-486, the abortion-inducing drug. The religiously inspired campaigners are using the excuse of medical complications – of course these are possible, but then I believe there are the odd few with pregnancy too.

Miss Frances Williams Wynn is today writing mainly about General Alava, the Spanish ambassador and great friend of the Duke of Wellington, and of some undiplomatic activity by an English envoy at the court of Catherine the Great, but the line that I enjoyed was about the Prince de Ligne:

“Who for fourscore years had lived with every person of distinction in Europe, and who, to the last moment, preserved not only every useful faculty, but wit and gaiety besides. He preserved also to the last a singular facility of versification, and was particularly fond of writing epitaphs on himself. They say that he must have written above 500, generally impromptus, and of course worthless.”

Prince Charles Joseph de Ligne has got a rather neat website, which includes a bibliography, and describes him thus:

“He was a grand aristocrat, a talented military man, an entertaining writer, a brilliant conversationalist, a great garden fancier, a moralist and a memoirist. Anyone interested in the years of his long lifetime – from 1735 to 1814 – will find him “unavoidable.” The Prince de Ligne witnessed the fall of Napoleon, who fascinated him but whom he refused to meet. He died during the Congress of Vienna, which redrew the map of Europe to the accompaniment of balls and intrigues.”

Don’t forget, the deadline for submissions for Carnival No 7 on Feministe is Sunday. The theme is a broad one, women and popular culture … more

A story that deserves to be broadcast to the rooftops – and with it demands for action to prevent this religious abuse – the children who are being labelled “witches”, in the Congo and surrounding states. They face physical abuse, and even murder.

“The pastor of a London-based African church has been arrested on suspicion of child cruelty after claims that he had been branding children as witches and ordering that they be sent back to Africa where he would pray for them to die.
…The children of up to ten families are alleged to have been affected at the church, one of more than a hundred Congolese churches in and around the capital. In one example, the BBC reported, a father branded his nine-year-old son with a steam iron. A former church elder told Stickler that he was present when the boy was said to be possessed with evil spirits and alleged that Mr Tukala told the parents to beat him until he confessed to being a witch.”

Of course this is a symptom of a society in the Congo that is in severe distress – and that is an international disgrace – but in the meantime everything possible should be done to fight against these churches.