Bibliotheca Polyglotta

The word is a loan from Grk pandokeîon (var. pandokíon, NT pandokheîon) ‘hostel, inn’ and was itself loaned into a number of Western Mediterranean languages, typically connected with medieval trade. “One could mention fondaco, which was a sort of accommodation for traders, with a warehouse and the possibility of selling” (Cifoletti 2007). It has come to mean ‘hotel’ in Egyptian Arabic but in Tunisian retains the meaning ‘caravanserai’ (ibid.), i.e., a type of “hostelries at which animals and humans can lodge, on the lines of the caravanserais or khāns of the Muslim East” (LeTourneau1964).

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v1: ^†caravanserai: mC8 mentioned (according to Lane) by al-Layṯ b. Naṣr b. Sayyār al-Ḫurasānī with the meaning ‘(in the dialect of the people of Syria) building of the kind called ↗ḫān, where men alight and lodge, [and in which they deposit their goods], of the ḫānāt that are in the roads, and in the cities’ (Lane VI: 2449). According to Pedani2013, the word appeared in Arabic texts by C9. mC9? Galen SM X 2,2 wa-ʔaḫbaranī baʕḍu ʔahli ’l-ṣidqi bal ʕiddatun minhum ʔannahum ʔakalū fī baʕḍi ’l-fanādiqi ʔamrāqan ṭayyibatan bi-luḥūmin maṭbūḫatin fīhā ‘some reliable people, quite a number of them even, told me that they had eaten in some funduq delicious soups with meat cooked in them’(< Grk allà kaì diēgouménōn tinṓn ḗkousa pistṓn anthrṓpōn hedēdokénai mèn én tini pandokheíō zōmón dapsilē̂ metà kreō̂n hēdístōn) (Ullmann2002: 493). – With this meaning the word entered into Western languages (cf., e.g., Ital fondaco ‘warehouse’) (ibid.).
v2: Should one separate the meaning ‘hostel, inn, hotel’ [when used without reference to trading, i.e., having lost the function of a warehouse]? The article by O’Meara mentions funduq, ↗ḫān, ↗samsaraẗ or ↗wakālaẗ as giving more or less the same meaning, depending on the region.

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Held to be of Persian origin by Sībawayh, but from Grk pandokeîon (Fück1950, Rolland2014), or pandokheîon (Heinrichs1997: 179, fn. 13) ‘hostel, inn’.
Classical dictionaries often specify that the word was used by ‘the people of Syria’ (ʔahl al-šām), while LeTourneau1964 says that it was in use “particularly in North Africa”. Fück1950 unites both with a plausible explanation when he reports that the Arab geographer al-Muqaddasī, in his ʔAḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʕrifat al-ʔaqālīm (completed in 955), mentioned funduq as characteristic of Syria, Egypt and North Africa, “die alten Einflußsphären des byzantinischen Reiches” [the old sphere of influence of the Byzantine Empire], while ḫān was in use in Persia and tīm in Transoxania – Fück1950: 111.

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