A good window into cultural history can be to look at the etymology of personal names, particularly given ones.
In some cultures, most names have obvious meanings. For instance, the name of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (Ashur-ban-apli) meant (the god) Ashur has given (us) a son.
In others, that isn’t the case. In English only a minority of names have clear meanings, and peculiarly these are almost all feminine. Women are named, for instance, after flowers – Daisy, Violet, Petunia (dated) --, times of the year – April, May, June, Summer --, and the precious stone Ruby. Virtues were also a source of names, although these are today all old-fashioned, such as Gay (happy), Felicity (again, happiness), and Prudence. Or perhaps the happiness referred to was that of the parents on the successful birth?
Some English names have meaning only in Old English or Proto-Germanic; these names tend to be old-fashioned. Alfred meant “elf counsel” – whether counsel to elves or counselled by them; or, in fact, a counselling elf, we cannot say. Albert meant “famous and noble”. Edward, Edmund, and Eamon all meant “protector of riches”; Edgar substitutes in the word gar, “spear”.
A lot of English names are Greco-Latinate in origin, often arriving via the Bible. Biblical names include the Apostles Peter (from Greek petros, rock), Andrew (Gr. aner, man), Philip (Gr. phillipos, fond of horses); as well as ones that were Hebrew or Aramaic in origin and Hellenised.
There are also many non-Biblical Latin names still in English today: Claudius and Claude, traditionally said to be ultimately from claudus (lame); Julian and Julia, perhaps originally from Iovis (Jupiter), Adrian from the city of Hadria in Italy; Sylvia from silua (forest) and so on.
Then you have those names which have come from a Germanic language through French, for instance William (“desire for a helmet”, a poetic way of saying “brave”?). Henry has its roots in a reconstructed Proto-Germanic word *Haimariks, which seems to mean “home of a king”. Geoffrey also arises from P-G, suggested to have meant “sanctuary / peace of the Geats”, who were a Swedish people of the Middle Ages.
In Japanese and other languages with logographic scripts, the situation is different – every name has a surface meaning communicated by the kanji with which its written. However, often these kanji do not reflect the real etymology of the name, due to widespread illiteracy in ancient times.
Modern Japanese people occasionally seem to name their children in a somewhat playful way. For instance, the kanji 月 (moon) is sometimes used with the “Anglo-reading” of Luna (“Runa”), or a circle O for its Japanese reading maru.
Japanese is also interesting in that, of course, many names are written with the jinmeiyo kanji, which were excluded from much of mainstream use by the post-war orthographic reforms. There are currently 863 official jinmeiyo kanji, a list which has grown from an initial ninety in 1951. The jinmeiyo kanji contain such characters as 丞 (help), 云 (say), 亘 (range), 杏 (apricot), and 廿 (twenty).