-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
Indo-European ablaut Indo-European ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (pronounced ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language. All modern Indo-European languages have inherited the feature, though its prevalence and productivity strongly varies. An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb "sing, sang, sung" and its related noun "song", a paradigm inherited directly from the Proto-Indo-European stage of the language. The term "ablaut" (from German "ab-" in the sense "down, reducing, gradated" + "Laut" "sound", thus literally meaning "sound gradation") was coined in the early nineteenth century by linguist Jacob Grimm. However, the phenomenon of