Okay, I must have read 1892 and transposed the numbers to 1982 and the 1939 date came from the date of the movie....That explains it {"it" being my mistakes with the dates for the publication of the poem "Gunga Din"}...Or, at least, it sounds good to me...

**

Btw, Q. I appreciate the information you've shared on this thread.

Now I've got another theory to run by you-and others.

I suppose that no one could determine for certainity what the playwright was thinking of, but what about Othello?

According to http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/1/Othello,
The boy's name Othello \o-thello, oth(el)-lo\ is a variant of Otto.

The baby name Othello sounds like Atholl, Atwell and Odell. Other similar baby names are Otho and Onjello"

-snip-

However, this may be a case of a name from one language being spelled the same or similarly but having an entirely different origin & meaning.

Apparently, there's a lot of debate among Shakespearean scholars about what the name "Othello" means. See this Oct 18, 2001 comment about Othello's namef rom Karen Peterson on
http://www.shaksper.net/archives/2001/2379.html

"In conversation once the subject of where Othello's name came from and what it might mean (if anything) arose.

I have always harboured a pet theory that it is an Italilanized version of Ottoman/Othoman/Othman, and that the play might be capitalizing on contemporary interest in the Turkish empire following the publication of Knolles's Generall Historie of the Turkes to the rising of the thoman Familie (1603).

...This is very much a part of what [Jonathan]Bate discussed in his keynote lecture to the World Shakespeare Congress in Valencia this past April. A shortened version of the lecture appears in this week's *Times Literary Supplement* ("Othello and the Other", 19 October 2001, pp. 14-15). Bate cites Knolles, and also "recently published books such as Lewis Lewkenor's 1599 translation of Gasparo Contarini's *The Commonwealth and Government of Venice* [and] John Pory's 1600 translation of *A Geographical History of Africa* by 'Leo Africanus'" (14).On the matter of Othello's name, Bate writes, "The audience hears a consonance between the names of the captain-general 'Othello' and that of the general enemy 'Ottoman'. This would have been especially apparent if, as is likely, the original pronunciation of the hero's name was Otello. Othman was the founder of the Turkish empire; Ottoman-ness is thus suggested by Othello's name, but he is turned against the origina implied by that name" (14).

Further, rather than perceiving "the Turks" as a monolithic entity, Bate argues that Shakespeare and his contemporaries, while perceiving all Islamic characters as "other," that they did draw distinctions between Turk, Arab, Barbar and Moorish cultures.

For what it's worth"
-snip-

That's Karen Peterson's ending sentence, not mine. But I'm presenting these comments, for what it's worth.

Well, what do you think about that theory?