Why do so many counties have names that end in “-istan”?
In: Other
-stan/-istan is a suffix in several common languages that’s the equivalent to -land in English. Just like England is “Land of the Angles”, Kazakhstan is “Land of the Kazakhs”.
Because those languages are much older than English and share a common root, many of the languages ended up with the same word for the same thing, like how all the Romance languages in Europe have a similar sounding word for, e.g., ‘love’; amour, amore, amor.
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