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Shameless plug to !linguistics@mander.xyz . This sort of question is welcome there.
Latin already did a bloody mess of those suffixes:
In turn those suffixes used to mean different things:
Then French and Norman inherited this mess, and... left it alone? Then English borrowed all those suffixes. But it wasn't enough of a mess, so it kept its native -ish suffix, that means the exact same thing. That -ish is from PIE *-iskos, and likely related to Latin -cus.
There's some awareness among English speakers that "
[$adjective]
istan" means roughly "country where the[$adjective]
people live", so the suffix is simply removed: Afghanistan → Afghan, Tajikistan → Tajik, etc.That -istan backtracks to Classical Persian ـستان / -istān, and it forms adjectives from placenames.
In turn it comes from Proto-Indo-European too. It's from the root *steh₂- "to stand", and also a cognate of "to stand". So etymologically "
[$adjective]
istan" is roughly "where the[$adjective]
people stand". (inb4 I'm simplifying it.)Note that India doesn't simply have different "languages"; it has a half dozen different language families. Like, some languages of India are closer to English, Russian, Italian etc. than to other Indian languages.
That said:
Now, why did Greek erase the /h/? I have no idea. Greek usually don't do this. But Latin already borrowed the word as "India", showing no aspiration.
So, the islands were named after Felipe II of Spain. And there's that convention that royalty names are translated, so "Felipe II" ended as "Philip II" in English. And so the "Islas Filipinas" ended as "Philippine Islands".
...but then the demonym was borrowed straight from Spanish, including its spelling: filipino → Filipino.
Note that this mess is not exclusive to English. As I hinted above, Latin already had something similar; and in Portuguese for example you see the cognates of those English suffixes (-ese/-ês, -an/-ano, -ic/-ego... just no -ish).
Except that for Portuguese simply inheriting the Latin suffixes wasn't enough, you got to reborrow them too. So you end with etymological doublets like -ego (see: Galícia "Galicia" → galego "Galician") and -co (see: Áustria "Austria" → austríaco "Austrian").
Then there's cases where not even speakers agree on which suffix applies, and it's dialect-dependent; e.g. polonês/polaco (Polish), canadense/canadiano (Canadian).
Besides afegão vs. Afeganistão (Afghan vs. Afghanistan), another example of a word where the demonym is shorter than the geographical name is inglês vs. Inglaterra (English vs. England). But it's the same deal: -terra is simply -land, so people clip it off.
There's also the weird case of "brasileiro" (Brazilian), that -eiro is a profession suffix. Originally it referred to people extracting brazilwood, then the country name was backformed from that.
Great comment as usual
Thank you for such a detailed answer!