My son and I quiz each other on the Stan countries occasionally. We learned them all at one point but easy to forget some.

Oh, I thought it was just coz Stanley was such a great guy

The Persian influence and the Slavic language area (which includes the Russian language) determine these. For example, in Romania, many leaders end in "ESCU"...and the other interesting thing is that there are only 2 Romanian female names that do not end in the letter "A" :D All this is due to the Latin influence...