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there's not really a lot of difference between Kuni and Geno - you may as well assume they mean the same thing in general. they're different derivatives (thus the differing stem) of the same Indo-European root with Latin genus (“kind, sort, ancestry, birth”), Ancient Greek γένος (génos, “kind, race”), Sanskrit जनस् (jánas, “kind, race”) and Celtic (*genos, famiy, clan, birth; used in names such as Old Welsh: Mor-gen; Gaulish: Ad-genus, Cintu-genus - the latter are presumably Romanized). The /i/ of Kuni results in umlaut of the u (OE Cyn-), in the late OE period then unrounded to /i/ to give modern English kin. There is, presumably, a noun based on the Germanic waif- root — English waif, from Anglo-Norman and Old French in the sense "stray, vagabond". A sense traveller, adventurer would fit the pattern of known themes (cf. feminine *waiþ "wandering, hunting/fishing"), but then again, the recorded gender of waif in Old French is masculine, not feminine (this doesn't mean there isn't a feminine noun — the -gard "court" theme has masculine and feminine variants with slightly different forms, as does the -frith "peace" theme — just that we don't know it).

This message was edited 7/28/2020, 9:17 AM