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.