Inuksuk – Type of manmade stone landmark or cairn.Great dolmen – Type of dolmen in Nordic megalith architecture.Of other Celtic languages, Welsh cromlech was borrowed into English and quoit is commonly used in English in Cornwall. The etymology of the German: Hünenbett, Hünengrab and Dutch: hunebed – with Hüne / hune meaning 'giant' – all evoke the image of giants buried ( bett/ bed/ grab = 'bed/grave') there. Dolmen originated from the Welsh expression taol maen which means 'stone table'. In the Basque Country, they are attributed to the jentilak, a race of giants. In Catalan-speaking areas, they are known simply as dolmen, but also by a variety of folk names, including cova ('cave'), caixa ('crate' or 'coffin'), taula ('table'), arca ('chest'), cabana ('hut'), barraca ('hut'), llosa ('slab'), llosa de jaça ('pallet slab'), roca ('rock') or pedra ('stone'), usually combined with a second part such as de l'alarb ('of the Arab'), del/de moro/s ('of the Moor/s'), del lladre ('of the thief'), del dimoni ('of the devil'), d'en Rotllà/Rotllan/Rotlan/Roldan ('of Roland'). The rarer forms anta and ganda also appear. Granja is used in Portugal, Galicia, and some parts of Spain. The later Cornish term was quoit – an English-language word for an object with a hole through the middle preserving the original Cornish language term of tolmen – the name of another dolmen-like monument is in fact Mên-an-Tol 'stone with hole' (SWF: Men An Toll.) ĭolmens are known by a variety of names in other languages, including Irish: dolmain, Galician and Portuguese: anta, Bulgarian: Долмени, romanized: Dolmeni, German: Hünengrab/Hünenbett, Afrikaans and Dutch: hunebed, Basque: trikuharri, Abkhaz: Adamra, Adyghe: Ispun, Danish and Norwegian: dysse, Swedish: dös, Korean: 고인돌, romanized: goindol, and Hebrew: גַלעֵד. Nonetheless it has now replaced cromlech as the usual English term in archaeology, when the more technical and descriptive alternatives are not used. A book on Cornish antiquities from 1754 said that the current term in the Cornish language for a cromlech was tolmen ('hole of stone') and the OED says that "There is reason to think that this was the term inexactly reproduced by Latour d'Auvergne as dolmen, and misapplied by him and succeeding French archaeologists to the cromlech". The name was supposedly derived from a Breton language term meaning 'stone table' but doubt has been cast on this, and the OED describes its origin as "Modern French". The Oxford English Dictionary does not mention dolmin in English and gives its first citation for dolmen from a book on Brittany in 1859, describing the word as "The French term, used by some English authors, for a cromlech. The word dolmen entered archaeology when Théophile Corret de la Tour d'Auvergne used it to describe megalithic tombs in his Origines gauloises (1796) using the spelling dolmin (the current spelling was introduced about a decade later and had become standard in French by about 1885).
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