{"id":7390,"date":"2012-08-03T16:49:21","date_gmt":"2012-08-03T15:49:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=7390"},"modified":"2012-08-03T16:49:21","modified_gmt":"2012-08-03T15:49:21","slug":"menhirs-dolmens-and-cromlechs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=7390","title":{"rendered":"Menhirs, dolmens and cromlechs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/p>\n

The word menhir<\/strong> come up in discussion yesterday and I posted it on Facebook<\/a> today along with the the Welsh translation maen hir<\/em>, which is what I found in this dictionary<\/a>. This provoked further discussion about whether the two terms mean the same thing. So I thought I’d find out.<\/p>\n

A menhir is a standing stone of the kind that Obelix delivers in the Asterix books. According to the Dictionary of Word Origins and the OED<\/a>, menhir comes from Breton mean-hir<\/em> (long stone), which is what the Welsh term maen hir<\/em> means, so it seems that they are the same. The usual Breton word for such standing stones is peulvan<\/em>, however. <\/p>\n

The word dolmen (a prehistoric structure of two or more upright stones surmounted by a horizontal one), comes via French from Breton: the men part means stone, and the dol part either comes from the Breton word t\u014dl<\/em> (table), a borrowing from the Latin tabula<\/em> (board, plank), or from the Cornish tol<\/em> (hole). So dolmen either means ‘stone table’ or ‘stone hole’.<\/p>\n

The word dolmen also exists in Welsh, and another word for such structures is cromlech, which exists in Welsh and English and comes from the Welsh words crwm<\/em> (bent, stooped) and llech<\/em> (stone), and is related to the Irish word cromleac<\/em> (‘bent stone’).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The word menhir come up in discussion yesterday and I posted it on Facebook today along with the the Welsh translation maen hir, which is what I found in this dictionary. This provoked further discussion about whether the two terms mean the same thing. So I thought I’d find out. A menhir is a standing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,104,107,111,127,10,77,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breton","category-english","category-etymology","category-french","category-irish","category-language","category-welsh","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}