We have them in Azerbaijan too.
Qanat
41–50 of 70 posts
Re: Qanat
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
These are nearly universal AFAIK. I've heard stipulated a link between this and the fact that these are the first sounds a child will learn.
> these are the first sounds a child will learn.
Not really, no. 'Gaga' or 'kaka' are just as easy yet aren't universal. The mystery is not solved. (Could be just areal effects, for example.)
Re: Qanat
#43The section about using qanats for cooling and ice storage by the Persians around 400 BCE [1] is fascinating.
Re: Qanat
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 stru…
You left out the Arabic influence, which is considerable for a huge amount of words in the sciences, math, chemistry, astrology, geology, botany and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabi...
Well … I didn't single it out even though it is on the border of being statistically significant but then again I did not mention any Semitic language. I didn't technically leave it out; it's lumped together in the "rest of the the world" bucket. Going by the link you gave me there are ~150 words of Arabic origin in English excluding domain specific jargon, far less than 1% of the language. But I take your point -- probably coming after the languages I mentioned and taking into account the order I mentioned them in Arabic would come next.
Re: Qanat
#45ⵜⴰⵔⴳⴰ
Re: Qanat
#46I 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
For me it was like having an insight into the subtext of the series. Quite a lot of Persian (PadehShah for king) , Arabic (Karama for blessings) , and Islamic (Mahdi for The Guided One), for example.
Re: Qanat
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a great list of these at https://web.archive.org/web/20070227031854/http://members.ao...
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".
The 'ma' and 'pa' sounds are some of the easiest sounds to make by babies since they just require the lips and don't involve the tongue.
Re: Qanat
#48I saw lots of these in Morocco, between the mountains and the Sahara.
Well, what I saw were the regularly spaced mounds of earth at the top of the access shafts.
Re: Qanat
#49Its funny to see this on HN! I was born and grown up in a warm area in Iran full of qanats and to me it seems such a natural thing. I caught my first fish from a qanat!
Re: Qanat
#50The section about using qanats for cooling and ice storage by the Persians around 400 BCE [1] is fascinating. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhchal
the last photo in the link was 10 min walk from my house. At that time (20yrs ago) they'd turned it into a ball pool for kids to play. Currently they've turned it into a Zoorkhaneh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlevani_and_zoorkhaneh_ritua...). This is nostalgic!