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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 th
by 505 10y ago
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
- cmkrnl 10y agoIndeed, now I always associate qanats with Leto Atreides II.
- david-given 10y agoHah. 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 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...
- torrent-of-ions 10y agoYep. I've remembered it because it would be quite useful in Scrabble (it's in the OED), but so far I haven't had the opportunity to use it.
- eternalban 10y agoFor 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.
- ars 10y ago> he uses many real-world cultures as sources for his world building Yup, like Kwisatz Haderach which is in Hebrew.