The answer appears to be yes. Both Arabic qanāt and Greek kánna are related to the Akkadian qanû, meaning "reed". The Greek word became latin canna for cane, then canalis for pipe or channel. See this entry in the Etymological Dictionary of Arabic for more: https://www2.hf.uio.no/polyglotta/index.php?page=record&view...
That doesn't answer the GP's question of whether there's an etymological link. That is, are the two words derived from the same root in some ancient language? It is a reasonable question since they are phonologically similar, but from different language families.
And just because two words sound similar doesn't mean they have similar roots. The word for “dog” in the Australian Aboriginal language Mbabaram happens to be “dog,” not because they have the same root but by coincidence.
What is also interesting is that certain words share similar literal constructions in unrelated languages.
The best example I've always thought of is the verb "to understand". Picture standing under something; you get to know it better.
In my native language Twi [1], the to understand is literally constructed as "to to sit under" I know of several other languages with very similar constructions.
There's nothing even slightly strange about it. The terms are self-recapitulating because parents mistake children's babbling for first words. If anything, it'd be strange if they weren't the same. Take a read of this: http://languagehat.com/trask-on-mama-and-papa/
canal deriv. : 1400-50; late Middle English: waterpipe, tubular passage < Latin canālis, perhaps equivalent to can (na) reed, pipe (see cane ) + -ālis -al1; def. 5 a mistranslation of Italian canali channels, term used by G. V. Schiaparelli
I am not an expert by any means, so we should wait the opinion of someone more competent than me, however.
I will say that there are not any link.
Most words in English come from two different roots, the German one and the Latin one.
It actually happens than in Latin "canal" is "canalis", so I can believe that the English word "canal" comes from Latin.
Usually Latin and Greek are the two roots and you don't explore deeper than that, but, given my limited knowledge, I cannot exclude that "qanat" comes too from Latin.
Edit: For completeness, the intermediated step between the Latin "canalis" and the English "canal" could be the Italian "canale"
Edit2: Actually from this page [1] it looks like the Latin "canalis" comes from the Greek "ka na" perhaps from the Assyrian "qanu". So it may be that there is a common root.
> 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.
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.
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.
