… somebody … anybody …
In Mark Twain's satirical play (Meisterschaft or : Even German is preferrable to death", which is about lerning the German language in then-America via the now considered not good system called "Meisterschaft" ("Championship"), he uses a variation of that which tells me where this originally came from.
The system called "Meisterschaft" apparingly consisted of letting people learn German-language phrases, and letting have them conversations with them.
The play itself is about 4 young people learning this way : 2 female, 2 male, and the try of them to get together this way.
Just an example from this play :
"She tells me that every time there's a moonlight night she coaxes them out for a walk; and if a body can believe her, she actually bullies them off to church three times every sunday !"
This "a body" is there a few times,. I haven't seen that before, but I've come to believe that nowadays there would stand "somebody" or "anybody", but "a body" is an even more neutral form.
Essentially, it means "a person", but to my ears it sounds strange to literally translate that as "body". We don't have that in German language.
"Body" means in German language "Körper" and exclusively means a physical thing.
Instead, we say "jemand". In that word, there you can faintly see the word "man" or "men". It basically means "somebody" or "someone" like in modern English, but is a bit more vague in my ears.
Of course we also have the word "person" in our language.
A similar thing is true with "someone" ("some-one") : We normally don't have a word with a numeral like that ("one").
It was first introduced as, for example, "meinereiner" (literally : "me-one") in a translation-dubbing of Bugs Bunny movies in the 70s or 80s. It still is not normal, proper modern German.
A similar word is is "no-one". Again, a numeral in it.
I had encountered it in the lyrics of a few songs my musician Mike Oldfield from the early 80s, written like "no-one", which I had adopted.
Modern English, though, seems to tend more to write it this way : "noone"., which i have read a lot of times, too.
German meaning : "Niemand". Again, there's that "man" or "men" in it.
Odysseus is (in)famous for using it.
Jemand :
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jemand
Niemand :
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/niemand
Somebody :
https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/somebody
Anybody :
https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/anybody
No-one :
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/no_one
And finally : Body :
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/body