(By Martin Haspelmath): "This chapter examines indefinite pronouns like 'somebody' and 'something' and distinguishes two major types. On the one hand, they may be closely related to the interrogative pronouns 'who' and 'what', as in Russian, where kto-to 'somebody' and čto-to 'something' are derived from kto 'who' and čto 'what' by means of the indefinite suffix -to. On the other hand, they may be closely related to the generic nouns 'person' and 'thing', as in Persian, where 'somebody' is expressed as kæs-i [person-indef] and 'something' is expressed as čiz-i [thing-indef]. In addition to the two major types, there are some languages with special expressions for 'somebody' and 'something', unrelated to anything else. An example is Abkhaz (Northwest Caucasian), where 'somebody' is aj˚ə̀ and 'something' is ak'ə̀ (Hewitt 1979: 158). Theoretically one might expect further types, e.g. indefinites derived from demonstrative pronouns, but no other types have been found. ❡
Languages may also show a mixed type, e.g. when 'somebody' behaves differently from 'something'. For instance, in Khmer the word for 'somebody' is kè:, which is also translated as 'person' and is unrelated to nɛək na: 'who', but the word for 'something' is ʔvɤy(-mú:əy), which is closely related to ʔvɤy 'what' (Jacob 1968: 134-135, 294, 322, 325). ❡
Finally, languages may lack nominal indefinite pronouns entirely and express the equivalent of ‘someone’ and ‘something’ by means of an existential construction."