Qanat

You might also want to learn about Karez that is used in Balochistan, Pakistan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhpjbi93Jzg

This one btw doesn't include the one that is strangest to me: that Chinese for mom or momma is 妈妈 "mama" and pop, pappa is 爸爸 "baba".

I first encountered this word reading Frank Herbert's Dune, so it was a bit odd when I encountered it in other literature. Later I realised one of the great things about Herbert's SF - he uses many real-world cultures as sources for his world building

Hah. I've just reread these, and I have been vaguely intending to look up 'qanat' to see if he made the word up.

Incidentally, I just came back from a holiday in Madeira --- amazing place if you like mountains; the average altitude of the island is 1300m --- and it's covered with a network of tiny canals called levadas. These collect trickles of water from the high summits, which are usually covered in cloud; it doesn't rain much. So they're kind of the opposite of a qanat. Instead of the water table being underground, it's way up high.

https://goo.gl/photos/a7eNGyJtiztiDFA86

Epicly, a lot of the levadas are in grooves chipped into the side of cliff faces. You can just about extrapolate the slope in that picture. Unfortunately in the really scenic bits I was too worried about not falling off to take photos. Safety railings are things which happen to other people in Madeira...

> Most words in English come from two different roots, the German one and the Latin one.

Not quite?

What I'm going to say is not exact but as a first approximation it should be okay[1].

English is a Germanic language[2]. Most (all?) common words in Modern English share a common ancestor with their counterparts in Modern German/Dutch/Swedish/Danish/Swiss/Norwegian -- I've left out a bunch, sorry! So lexically and structurally they are very similar. That doesn't mean that most words are Germanic in origin, however it does mean that in any given text most word _occurrences_ are going to be. This accounts for a quarter (~25%) of the lexicon but the _bulk_ of words in any given text.

So words like "is", "can", "will", "must", "water", "the", "and", "word", "bread", "blood", and so on.

Of the rest English has borrowed from _many_ sources. Latin (but this is true of many languages) and French being equally predominant, a bit less than 30% each. Latin because of the Roman Empire and subsequently Latin being the language of European learning. French because of the Norman conquest of England. You ought not to think of this as being borrowed twice over from Latin, once directly, once indirectly. The influence of French on English is immense.

Of the remaining, (Ancient) Greek at a bit more than 5% features predominantly -- though it punches above its weight because so many crucial technical words are from this source, words we'd be hamstrung without.

Then words derived from proper names, then words derived from other European and Indo-European languages. Then the rest of the world.

As Persian/Farsi is an Indo-European language it would be unwise to say there is no link. Especially if the technology is old and the technology spread. And I think a sibling-ish comment points out that there is a direct link.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_English_words_by_coun...

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/education/gallery/2015/jan/23/a-l...