Indo-European copula copula (with corresponding voiceless and voiced fricatives) existed side by side in Germanic, and the involvement of a separate root "" is unnecessary. The root "*(s)teh-" meant "to stand". From this root comes the present stem of the so-called "substantive verb" in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, "tá" and "tha" respectively. On the absence of the initial s- in Celtic, see Indo-European s-mobile. In Latin, "stō, stare" retained the meaning "to stand", until local forms of Vulgar Latin began to use it as a copula in certain circumstances. Today, this survives in that several Romance languages (Galician-Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan) use it
Afghanistan is documented in the 10th-century geography book "Hudud ul-'alam". The root name "Afghan" was used historically in reference to a member of the ethnic Pashtuns, and the suffix "-stan" means "place of" in Persian. Therefore, Afghanistan translates to "land of the Afghans" or, more specifically in a historical sense, to "land of the Pashtuns". However, the modern Constitution of Afghanistan states that "[t]he word Afghan shall apply to every citizen of Afghanistan." Excavations of prehistoric sites by Louis Dupree and others suggest that humans were living in what is now Afghanistan at least 50,000 years ago, and that farming communities