I'm sometimes impressed by all the semantic drifts that happened from Latin to Spanish. That would mean "square act" (it has the shape of a square) using Spanish cognates (acto cuadrado).

I find it easier to read Latin, due to my knowledge of Spanish, than Old English!
(Or even Shakespearean English for that matter). The Romance languages for the most part changed little (except French! a complete monstrosity!)

No, I know what it is, I'm wondering what it's called in English, or if there even is an English word for it.

This is the first time I heard about this 'Joch' thing and it made me think that if you want more land you should be your oxen to go faster

Anyway, I find ancient measurements to be quite interesting. One of my professors talked for over half an hour about the trouble that Greeks had because of their non-standard measure. Basically they could never have generic blueprints for things like McMansions. The architect was also the foreman of the construction site and had to break sticks the size of his foot to hand out to the workers so that they could get the measurements right.

Thinking about the math must have been a pain in the ass (and not just from their horrid representational system). They couldn't say for instance that a 6 X 13 column temple (a common type) had to have a base of so many feet. They had to measure how many feet it would be using theirs and the do all the calculations from scratch!

Oh yeah and if you think this is more off topic than the Joch discussion, then, well, at least its about Greece which is closer culturally to Jesus Land (the original, not the cheap American knock-off ) than Austria so there!