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[Facts] Oteil
I was reading about a musician named Oteil Burbridge on wikipedia ("Burbridge was born and raised in Washington, D.C.,[1] to an African American family with some Egyptian heritage. His name, Oteil, means 'explorer' or 'wanderer'")...Does anyone know if the given meaning of Oteil is accurate, and where it comes from?
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I can’t find any source for that outside of Wikipedia and the only words I can find in other languages that sound similar mostly mean “hotel.” There’s always the chance that it comes from an obscure source or it’s spelled in an unusual way, but given that Google searches containing his name only turn up results about him, I’d say that it’s probably made-up. Wondering if the “Egyptian” mention was significant, I looked through a dictionary of Ancient Egyptian words and came up with nothing. The language was written without vowels, so I was looking at words beginning with “t,” but there weren’t even any “t” words that contained an “l”. I didn’t search through Egyptian Arabic words, so I guess that’s a possibility too, but the standard Arabic words for explorer and wanderer sound completely different.

This message was edited 8/7/2018, 10:21 AM

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It's usually spelled Otile, and is a surname, as well as a unisex personal name. There are a few french communes called Auteuil (also in Quebec), from which surnames are derived, but Otile seems to be a variant of Otilia (the normal form in Portugal and Eastern Europe)/Odile (A saint and the black swan from Swan Lake), a feminine derivative of Odo or Otto, which is from a Germanic root meaning "(inherited) land>fortune>happiness".
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If you go through the archived link on Wikipedia where they cited that information, it says that it means "explorer" or "wanderer" in Egyptian... which isn't a language. Arabic is the language spoken in Egypt. Hopefully someone with more Arabic knowledge will reply, but closest I can get is التائه "drifter, wanderer", which is transcribed as altayih which is kind of similar? I'd take it with a grain of salt.
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Egyptian certainly is a language... it's just a dead one. The source may actually have meant Ancient Egyptian or even Coptic:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_languagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_languageAlso, just because a language is dead, doesn't mean that people can't make (or derive) names from surviving vocabulary of the language in question.
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