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BtN says it might be Germanic, but there are numerous problems - this is a late Roman saints name, and the spelling is Roman, rather than Germanic or Celtic. for starters in late Latin /i/ is frequently lowered to /e/, and in Latin in general, G and C are interchangeable depending on whether the context calls for a voiced /g/ or an unvoiced /k/, whereas in Germanic, they are not. This makes matching anything to known Germanic or Celtic name elements difficult. Name elements may not be exclusively Germanic, but combine Latin, Celtic or Germanic elements in one name (and indeed, in East Germanic there will be Alan name elements as well, which later pass into broader circulation). Further, Saint's lives from this period are generally later fabrications and the stories often don't fit established historical facts - they have essentially been retconned. by the time of the purported St Genevieve, the Roman army, particularly in Gaul, was deeply Germanic - Frankish, Vandal, Gothic and Saxon troops filled the ranks from the lowest foot-soldier to Magister Militum. We expect Gallo-Romans at this stage to have Roman names, not Gallic, so when we find a non-Roman name, there is an expectation it will be "Germanic" (or possibly Alan). In regards to Genowefa, we can reconstruct an ancient Germanic *Gainawaifa, OHG *Geinaveif, Low German/Romanised Genavefa. Both Gain- and waif- are established thematic elements (unlike wif), the problem though is that they don't match any suitable recorded words to give us a meaning. Gain- is sometimes interpreted as the adverb/preposition "against", but this doesn't really make sense as a name element and may instead be an obsolete name for a type of weapon, cognate with gais- and gar-; waif- should in this case be a feminine noun/adjective (ironically wif is not), but no such word can be found - not unusual as the corpus is limited. the closest is the verb "wave" or possibly related verbs meaning "clothe, wrap", but a related noun is unrecorded except in the form wæfel "cloak", and as is usual for items of clothing, is masculine. There is another name-element Gin- (frequently Gim- before /b/ and /f/), another word for broad, immense which might also be Romanised as Gen-; and it may even be the Roman root Gen- itself in combination with the Germanic -waif.

This message was edited 7/27/2020, 8:42 PM