What does the suffix -stan mean in words like “Afghanistan” and “Pakistan?
“Persian”-root or “Farsi”-root would be more correct. Hindu-stan has been around more than 1300-plus years. Like all things Farsi, the literary-dictionary explanation falls short. That’s how, relegating the Jerusalem-occupying force to the dustbins of history became: Wipe Jerusalem off the map.
Stan is where one “lives”, not where one stands, no matter how nicely it rhymes, a subtle difference, I know—inevitable when you translate “liquid” Farsi into “stone” English—Analogy of the late Naipaul.
Alessandrob
The suffix stan means place or land in almost all Indo-European languages not just in Farsi and it is used by the Kurds,Balochs, Hindus and in swedish language it means town such as gamlestan which means the old town. The persians have nothing to do with the wide spreading of the suffix in Eurasia at all, and they don’t use it in the name of their own country like Persianstan or Iranstan.
-Stan is formed from the old Iranian root *sta- “to stand, stay,” and means “place where one stays,” i.e., homeland or country. Names such as Afghani-stan, Tajiki-stan, Hindu-stan are formed by adding this suffix to the usually pluralized names of the people living in that country, as the Afghani (one Afghan) live in Afghanistan. However, Pakistan was formed from the initial letters of “Punjab,” “Afghanistan,” and “Kashnir” and the questionable extended suffix -istan. So, now there is an extended suffix floating around that may be added to new countries, the name of whose people is not pluralized by the suffix -i. By the way, Iranian is the mother language from which the modern Persian or Farsi, Pashto, Baluchi, etc. languages developed. The Germanic language family, of which English (German, Swedish, Dutch, etc.) is a member, developed from the same great-great-grandmother, Proto-Indo-European (PIE) some 7,000 years ago, so the same root also turns up in English “stand,” “stay,” “stea
