In central Asia, naming a country after its people and adding the suffix -stan seems to be legio.
Tajikistan
Uzbekistan
Kazakhstan
Turkmenistan
Waziristan
Kyrgyzstan
Pakistan
and of course
Afghanistan
I’m sure there are more. There’s obviously a pattern and I doubt all the folks from these countries share a common language, so did colonial powers name them? Or was there another reason? and where does -stan come from, what does it mean?
Curious minds in Swedestan wants to know. Especially since “i stan” means “in town” in Swedish. Uncle Scrooge and Donald were always going away on adventures in “Farawayistan” when I was a kid (the golden age of Carl Barks, but I digress).
“stan” comes from a Persian word meaning homeland. So Tajikstan is home of the Tajiks, Afghanistan is home of the Afghans, etc. All of those countries were, at some time in their history, heavily influenced by the Persians.
In Atlantic City or thereabouts there’s a street called “Plaza Place”. That belongs in your “Landistan”. Maybe in a city called “Villapur” or “Cityville”.
Latin verb legere (to gather) has a form ‘legio’ which became French ‘legion’ and was borrowed to English. And naturally Swedish stad and the form i stan (i staden) have common linguistical roots with Persian 'stans, as this is a very old Indo-European word.
A while back, possibly during the Days of Madness of the tech boom, I saw an essay describing net users as inhabitants of “Cyberstan”. It was linked to various proposals for untraceable encrypted electronic money, with the hope that an untaxable net-based economy could somehow arise disconnected from any physical moorings.
There is also the acronym UKOGBANI for the Uniked Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This sounds enough like an adjective form–Ukogbani–that there should be a noun form: Ukogbanistan…
I coined Ukogbanistan in another forum some time ago. Alas that posting where I did it is lost do to ezboard having had much of their archives deleted under circumstances that I forget the details of. For inexplicable reasons, they failed to keep an off-line copy of those archives, so the message is lost forever.
Just for the sake of precision: Pakistan does not fall into this rule so cleanly – Pakistan is not the land of the Pakis, as far as I know. The PAK part is an initialism for Punjab, Afghan and Kashmir.
I believe the term was originally Pakstan, a term coined in the 1930’s. It included people from the three aforementioned ethnic groups, as well as others.
I think someone tried a back formation saying that Pakistan was the land (stan) of the “pure”, but I have no idea in what language Paki means pure, and when this idea was first floated.
Pak means clean or pure in Persian, and in Urdu they tend to use it to mean holy or sacred. The name design was a deliberate acronym, a play on words attributed to an Indian Muslim student at Cambridge in the 1930s. I forgot his name, Muhammad somebody. He suggested Panjab, Afghans, and Kashmir as the source of the acronym or play on words “Pak.” Someone suggested filling out the whole name this way: Panjab, Afghans, Kashmir, Sindh, and the ending from Baluchistan.
I can beat that. There’s a rise in Britain called Torpenhow Hill. The problem? If you translate it all into English, it means Hillhillhill Hill! Tor, pen and how are all “hill” in, respectively, Old English, Welsh, and Old Norse.
I was going to mention Australia’s Townsville, a name so utterly generic-sounding that it was chosen as the deliberately generic setting for the Powerpuff Girls (probably without the creators even knowing such a town actually existed). But I think I’ve been beaten.
If you google Ukogbanistan, you get two sites, one of which is Not Safe For Work (origin of the term ‘cum’ as relates to semen). This is the other one: hand truck vs dolly. In fact, the OP has the same username as you.
Yes, that’s my post on Dave Wilton’s Wordorigins message board where I used it. But it’s not the post where I coined it, which was also on that board but some time ago (last year, I think). Others have since occasionally used the name on that board, which is what the other Google hit is. Any other uses on that board were lost in the aforementioned archive deletion.
