-stan "koborsthan" ( "") "graveyard/cemetery", known as "Qabaristan" as (). Originally an independent noun, this morpheme evolved into a suffix by virtue of appearing frequently as the last part in nominal compounds. It is of Indo-Iranian and ultimately Indo-European origin: It is cognate with Sanskrit "" (Devanagari: ), meaning "the act of standing", from which many further meanings derive, including "place, location; abode, dwelling", and ultimately descends from Proto-Indo-Iranian . The Proto-Indo-European root from which this noun is derived is (older reconstruction ) "to stand" (or "to stand up, to step (somewhere), to position (oneself)"), which is also the source of
Proto-Indo-European language word and were used to derive related words (e.g., "-"friend"-" in the English words ""befriend"", ""friends"", and ""friend"" by itself). Proto-Indo-European was a fusional language, in which inflectional morphemes signalled the grammatical relationships between words. This dependence on inflectional morphemes means that roots in PIE, unlike those found in English, were rarely found by themselves. A root plus a suffix formed a word stem, and a word stem plus a desinence (usually an ending) formed a word. Many morphemes in Proto-Indo-European had short "e" as their inherent vowel; the Indo-European ablaut is the change of this short "e" to short