Why do so many counties have names that end in “-istan”?
In: Other
Many wrongly believe that the ‘stan’ is originally Persian. That’s not true. ‘Stan’ is from Sanskrit where ‘sthaan’ means place. Persia borrowed this from Sanskrit.
The oldest known written text in Persian is much recent than 1000 BC. Meanwhile, Sanskrit had full fledged grammar books, books on astronomy, medicine, metallurgy, books on the art of dance, sex, administration, war etc, couple of epics etc way way before that. Sanskrit had long been using Stan to denote a place. Place of birth had long been called janmasthan (janma-birth, sthan-place). So Persian borrowed that word (among many others) from Sanskrit.
Latest Answers