Étienne Fourmont

Étienne Fourmont (23 June 1683 – 8 December 1745) was a French scholar and Orientalist who served as professor of Arabic at the Collège de France and published grammars on the Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese languages.

Although Fourmont is remembered as a pioneering sinologist who did careful and influential work on the nature of Chinese characters, his legacy is significantly tarnished by the fact that he earned his early reputation by stealing the work of Arcadius Huang, whom he had helped catalog the royal sinological collection, and that he frequently plagiarized the works of other scholars.