Nick on Quora

There’s lots of these—Modern Greek from Ancient Greek, Russian from Old Church Slavonic—but I’m not aware of a generic term. In Greek. for example, these are referred to as learnèd loans (λόγιο δάνειο)—but a learned loan in English is a loan from Latin, not Old English. (In fact we do have a term for learned loans in English: inkhorn terms.)

Such borrowings are often the result of linguistic purism, which seeks to use “native” lexical resources instead of foreign terms. But purism isn’t the only motivation for them, so I wouldn’t call them purisms…

The Sir Thomas More answer is correct.

However, the 14th century Byzantine theologian Neophytus Prodromenus independently coined the term in his treatise Against the Latins [Catholics]. In his text, it was a variant of ἀτοπία “un-placed-ness”, which was the Greek word for absurdity, fallacy.

the definition of polity 

1530-40; < Latin polītīa < Greek polīteía citizenship, government, form of government, commonwealth, equivalent to polī́te-, variant stem of polī́tēs citizen

Online Etymology Dictionary

1530s, from Middle French politie (early 15c.) or directly from Late Latin polita “organized government” (see policy (n.1)).

Policy and Police ultimately derive from the same Greek word, but more directly reflect the Latin/French sense of “public order”.

Politeia is a term that gets a lot of use in Classical Greek philosophy, both Plato (it’s the term translated as The Republic) and  Aristotle (in his Constitution of the Athenians , the first comprehensive survey of political systems).

The 1530s import of the term directly from Greek/Latin, rather than via French (the tell-tale –c-) points for me to Renaissance rediscovery of the Classics….

… and looking up the OED 1st edition, I’m wrong: the 1530s instance has the same meaning as the French, “public order”. (I wonder if the French politie was a re-Latinisation? OED says it dates from 1419.)

Definition of polity (Aha! So OED content *is* free online…)

1538 STARKEY England 1.ii.51 Pepul, rude, wythout polyty, can not vse that same [riches] to theyr owne commodyte

That’s this guy: Thomas Starkey . The text is A supplicacyon for the beggers : Fish, Simon, d. 1531 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive  (mislabelled)

The modern meaning “2. a. A particular form of political organization, a form of government.”, which corresponds directly to the Ancient Greek sense, seems to be first attested in:

1597 Hooker Eccl. Pol. v. lxxix. §3 We preferre..the Spartan before the Athenian Politie. – See more at: http://findwords.info/term/polit…

Looks pretty clearly like an allusion to Aristotle. That’s Richard Hooker , in his book entitled—would you believe it: Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (which still refers to the “policy” sense). The quote is here: Online Library of Liberty

if all men be taught of nature to wish and as much as in them lieth to procure the perpetuity of good things, if for that very cause we honour and admire their wisdom who having been founders of commonweals could devise how to make the benefit they left behind them durable, if especially in this respect we prefer Lycurgus before Solon and the Spartan before the Athenian polity, it must needs follow that as we do unto God very acceptable service in honouring him with our substance, so our service that way is then most acceptable when it tendeth to perpetuity.

EDITED: The term you are looking for is Definitional chain. See e.g. Introducing Semantics

Originally:

The term you are looking for is: Circular definition .

Murad Abraham points out in comments that’s not what he was looking for.

Product (mathematics) . The Greek for it is the participle γενόμενον, “what has become, what has come into existence”, which I would assume was calqued into Latin as “what is produced”. The LSJ dictionary lists the participle “what has become” for product as being used in Euclid ; but the verb “becomes” for “adds up to…” is already used in Plato.

LSJ reports that δύναμαι “to be capable” was used for “is the result of multiplying two numbers” in Pappus of Alexandria , 600 years after Euclid; so “product” was not the only possible way it could have been named.

Um. Per Minoa, there are several sites that have been known as Minoa, mostly in the Aegean.  But in the sense Minoa is used on Quora, as a shorthand for “site of the Minoan civilisation”, that would be Crete.

In fact, since the Classical survival of non-Hellenic Eteocretan language  was in easternmost Crete, where I hail from, I could well say Minoa today is Lasithi preferecture—though that presupposes that Eteocretan is the same as Minoan.

What island did the Minoans inhabit?  is a similar question.

Vowel change was a strategy for forming plurals in Old English. The process is shared among Germanic languages, and is Germanic umlaut. Ultimately it comes from –iz being a plural suffix in Proto-Germanic: the plural of *mūs was *mūsiz, and the plural of *fōts was *fōtiz.

In time, *mūsiz went to mȳs in Old English (pronounced müs), because the following –i changed the vowel in mus by umlaut from /u/ to… <ü> (hence the name umlaut), before the whole –iz suffix dropped off. Middle English lost the /y/ sound, so mȳs became mīs, spelled mice.

Umlaut was one of the two strategies of forming plurals in Old English, and used to be much more common. (The plural of book used to be bēc, just like the plural of foot was fēt.) The other strategy was adding an –s to the noun, and that strategy prevailed in Middle English.

Can Asterix Finally Conquer the US? (Peter Hoskin, The Daily Beast):

So why has the USA remained unmoved? My best guess is Asterix’s historical setting. At its largest, the Roman Empire stretched from modern-day Portugal in the west to Iran in the east, from the lower reaches of Egypt in the south to the base of Scotland in the north. Yet never once did it cross the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Whatever-It-Was on the other side. Asterix and Obelix made this journey, of course, in Asterix and the Great Crossing—but not those imperialist Romans.

Where they did roam, the Caesars imprinted themselves on the land and on its inhabitants’ collective psyche. Look around you in Britain, and there’s probably one of their ruins somewhere. Their conquests are part of our island story. We are still taught their language in some of our schools. Which means that, when it comes to Asterix comics, we’re in on the joke in a way that Americans aren’t.

[…]

The establishment of the Comics Code was the establishment of an American comics scene dominated by one thing above all others: superheroes. There might have been variety once, what with all the romance, horror, and crime comics on the stands back then. But these suffered disproportionately under the new regime. Only the superheroes were really able to stretch their muscles, and they left little room for anything else—particularly not some Eurohistory import from France.

It’s still Nixon in China for me. I have a soft spot for Short Ride In A Fast Machine, even if it is all flash. Harmonilehre, as a third pressing of Mahler. Grand Pianola Music, for the sheer impudence of it. (Lolapalooza does that too.)

The following article has excellent background on the cultural anxieties that The Death of Klinghoffer tripped off—and a fascinating comparisons with the ambivalence around Jews in Seinfeld.

<em>Klinghoffer</em> in Brooklyn Heights

Oh, and my answer is also no.