Kinboot, -bute, -bot. A wergeld or
man-boot paid by a homicide to the kin of the person
slain.
Dear
Abdellah,
The Russian
equivalent of "kinboot" is vira. Interestingly, this obsolete, yet
existing word (it is in the Dahl dictionary, and even in the Oxford
Russian-English dictionary where it is translated as "wergeld") is close to both
"Vyra" (the name of VN's family estate) and "Vera" (the name of his wife). It is
also close to the Latin vir.
May I switch to
another subject and ask you a question about "Camera obscura." And I mean
not Nabokov's novel of that title (which was changed to Laughter in the
Dark in the English version), but Hildebrandt's. Didn't you (or anyone else
on the List) read it by chance? The book is said to be a Dutch classic that
Marx (into whose family history I recently did some research) had been
reading in order to learn
Dutch.
Alexey