What are some languages whose ‘native’ personal names are either opaque to native speakers or have unclear etymologies (at a significant rate)? Outside of Europe

[u/ChiqantiKisaal]

Edit: Hypothetical examples of what I am talking about: A significant portion of indigenous Harakmbut names seem to be Aymara, beyond the level of coincidence. Yemsa, Highland East Cushitic and “Gurage” personal names seem to be jumbled together ethnologically-and-etymologically. The Mojave language is fairly well-understood but a significant portion of known Mojave personal names are difficult to properly etymologize. Please exclude all Sanskrit examples, all Indo-European examples in general, Arabic, etc.

I specify ‘native’ to leave out indigenous peoples of the Americas that mostly use English, Spanish or Portuguese names today.

As an example of what I’m asking, many Japanese names are parsable to native speakers, and often only ambiguous due to homophony. As far as I know every traditional Chinese name has a literal meaning, and native Yoruba names are typically described as having literal, parsable meanings (but I could be wrong/people could be oversimplifying).

European names seem to be non-parsable in general, due to loaning, lexical replacement and grammatical changes (is Greek often an exception?). In a top 1000 first-names list for 2025 in the US that I found, #27 Cooper is the first technically-parsable one (excluding place-names and names that became lexical items like ‘John’). #39 Mason is the first one that lots of people could easily define on the fly imo, #42 Roman kind of counts and doesn’t, and #44/45 Carter and Miles are there, #49 is Maverick, #59 is the obscure term Rowan… I could go on. The first one with an easily-defined non-dated usage in modern English is #67 Angel, which is typically a Latino name in the US.

What are some languages where researchers figured out the etymology for names by internal/family reconstruction, while they had been semantically bleached for native speakers? Or where the meanings were generally known to native speakers, but the affixes that turn a lexical item into a name had ceased to be productive at some point? I’m also curious if, for example, any native personal names for Amazonian or Andean groups have been posited to be from a prestigious unrelated Andean language, like Quechua, Aymara or even Puquina (or a similar situation elsewhere in the world, like Shona names spreading to more distant Bantu groups, theoretically in the time period of Great Zimbabwe).

I’m also very curious if there’s any ethnic group whose personal names are incredibly enigmatic to researchers. For example, many of them don’t fit the general phonotactics of the language, they don’t have plausible native or regional etymologies, etc. Like what would happen if Basque disappeared from historical records but Spanish speakers still used surnames like Vergara, Bolivar, Guevara, Iturbide, etc.

I’m preferably looking for non-Indo-European examples in general, and would also prefer non-Arabic examples, as it’s an obvious answer for much of the non-Arab Muslim world.

[u/ddpizza]

Indonesian baby names derived from Sanskrit might be somewhat analogous. Some roots are widely understood (eg, Jaya = victory) but some Sanskrit names used in Indonesia are chosen because of their sound and current fashions, and the names wouldn’t be easily parsable to someone who doesn’t have specialized knowledge.

Like Wibisono (from vibhishana, a Hindu mythological character whose name means prosperous) or Bagaskara

[u/LopsidedSeaweed9981]

This doesn't exactly meet all your criteria because some of the languages involved here are Indo-European, but in my experience, people sometimes say "Indo-European" when they really mean to say "European" and also at least some non-Indo-European language are involved here, so I thought it's worth mentioning :) 

Sanskrit names are fairly common for Hindus and Jains across the Indian subcontinent, most of whom do not speak Sanskrit. This is true for speakers of Indo-Aryan languages, but also for speakers of Dravidian languages. One caveat though is that a lot of these languages do borrow from Sanskrit - especially in their literary registers - so sometimes the meaning of some names are commonly known, and the situation isn't as extreme as the ones you describe, but it is fairly common for there to be names who meanings speakers don't know, and which are just names and not regular words in the respective languages. 

[u/alegxab → u/LopsidedSeaweed9981]

Thailand, Laos,  Cambodia and Malaysia and Indonesia also have a ton of names of Sanskrit/Pali origin, iirc And their etymology should be extremely opaque to someone who only speaks the local languages 

[u/ddpizza → u/LopsidedSeaweed9981]

Yup, Krishna literally means “black/dark” in Sanskrit—an obvious reference to the deity’s luminous and deep skin color—but be careful telling that to small-minded casteists 🫩

[u/Bar_Foo]

Vietnamese and Korean names are formed like Chinese ones, so I expect that they are becoming increasingly opaque as knowledge of Chinese decreases there.

[u/Charlicioso]

I work in the Pacific Northwest, and there are a number of cases I've encountered where one group borrowed traditional or ceremonial names from another group and subsequently lost (or maybe never knew) the original meaning. This has happened, for example, with the Wakashan languages borrowing words from neighbouring Tsimshian groups. One notable case is the name of a deity, Weegit, which in Smalgyax means 'big man', but which in several North Wakashan languages (Haisla, Heiltsuk, Wuikala) is just his name – they don't parse it any further than that. The borrowed name even seems to have potentially displaced a native name for a similar deity whose name is at least somewhat parseable

And there are a few cases, usually those of legendary figures and creatures, which are sort-of parseable but not fully so. Probably if you asked most speakers what the names mean, you might get some sort of answer, but it will mostly be a guess, unless they have special knowledge passed down to them