[505]

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

[david-given]

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...

[eternalban]

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.

[torrent-of-ions]

Yep. 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.

[cmkrnl]

Indeed, now I always associate qanats with Leto Atreides II.

[ars]

> he uses many real-world cultures as sources for his world building

Yup, like Kwisatz Haderach which is in Hebrew.