fulan

For a while now I’ve been wondering about the origins of the term “fulan”, used in Arabic to refer to an unnamed person – like “so-and-so” in English.

It’s also found in other languages. In Spanish and Portuguese it’s “fulano”; the Spanish equivalent of “Tom, Dick and Harry” is “Fulano, Zutano y Mengano”, and in Portuguese it’s “Fulano, Beltrano e Sicrano”. It shows up as “filano” in the Italian “ogni Tizio, Caio, Sempronio, Mevio, Filano, e Calpurnio” (although only the first three names are commonly used).

There’s general agreement that the Spanish “fulano” comes from the Arabic, and other languages such as Persian, Turkish and Albanian have borrowed the term from Arabic too. However one source I read suggested that it entered Spanish via Hebrew:

Hebrew also has the term ploni almoni, which was used in the Bible:

Cognates of “fulan” are also found in Aramaic and Syriac:

As for where the Semitic root f-l-n or p-l-n originated, one suggestion is that it came from Egyptian “pw rn”, meaning “this man”:

And what happens if a reader doesn’t know that “fulan” means an unspecified person? I came across this in a 1925 paper called Clues for the Arabian Influence on European Musical Theory:

The author added a note: