Roman Phalangites?

[PMBardunias]

In reply to PMBardunias, phalanx has too many meanings to be restricted just to a particular military use by Greeks for a few centuries. Your hands and feet are veritable phalanxes - the distal bones are 'phalanges,' named for their serried array in files and ranks.

Ha! I did not mean to imply that we rewrite osteology texts. We call the bones that specifically because science needs a vocabulary, so we simply take the general term from another language and apply it to a specific item. We cannot say "finger" and mean "the bones of a finger". We can say "finger" in Greek and tell everyone it means "the bones of a finger" in English.

In the same way we commonly give a meaning to phalanx- spear-men in close formation- that did not exist historically. We are using it as jargon and as such we can define its usage more narrowly in the context of ancient warfare for the sake of clarity.