Given how unexpectedly popular it was on Reddit, I thought it might be worth sharing this rather interesting discussion on how to translate a word like “ninja” into Latin.
https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/comments/e7d9cg/translatingcoining_ninja_in_latin/
That was a bit more of a sophisticated discussion than I expected. However, I’m pretty sure that the Romans simply would have Latinized the term. Plenty of examples, and not just from Greek, e.g., essedum,
Dictionarium latino-lusitanicum ac Iaponicum (1595); reprinted in Lexicon latino-iaponicum (Petitjean, 1870):
Explorator> , oris. > Lus. > Espia. > Iap. > Metçuqe, qegouo miru sito, > xinobi> .
I have no idea how to decipher this Japanese text, but pair “shinobi - explorator” seems appropriate.
With the help of the Internet, and particularly @shaberu_ningen, the Japanese part of the sentence can be explained:
(I have zero knowledge of Japanese though)