A NY Times interactive story about “the world’s rarest pasta,” by Matt Goulding, is interesting on a number of counts. Of course if one likes pasta it’s great to see it being made in such an elaborate way (“Stretched by hand, a single ball of dough is converted into 256 gossamer strands that are stretched across a drying rack called a fundo in a triangular pattern, to evoke the Holy Trinity”), but it’s the name that’s of Hattic interest: “su filindeu, the threads of God.” Actually, that has to be singular, because according to the Wikipedia article on Sardinian su is the singular article, the plural being sos. The town where the pasta is made is Nuoro (Italian pronunciation [ˈnuːoro] or “less correctly” [ˈnwɔːro]; Sardinian Nùgoro [ˈnuɣɔɾɔ]); the English article gives no etymology, while the Italian one provides some speculation (“Secondo un’altra interpretazione, il toponimo Nùoro deriva dalla radice paleosarda nur, da cui il termine nuraghe”). This map shows the dialect regions and gives the Sardinian names of major towns; you will note that the capital, Cagliari, has two very different names, as explained in the relevant Wikipedia article:
Cagliari was known to the Phoenicians and Carthaginians as Karaly (Punic: 𐤊𐤓𐤋𐤉, ᴋʀʟʏ). This was Latinized variously as Carales, Karales, Caralis, and Calares (grammatically plural). […] Over time the judicial city became the center of what is now the neighborhood of Santa Gilla or Stampace, and in medieval Sardinian was thus called Santa Igia (contraction of Saint Cecilia). With the arrival of Pisans the new citadel on the top of the hill was identified in the documents as Castellum Castri de Kallari and later by the Catalan-Aragonese as Castell de Caller in Catalan. Then on adoption of the Spanish language during Spanish rule the name became Callari and finally in the House of Savoy period the name was simply transliterated into Italian, obtaining the current Cagliari. In the Sardinian language the current name Casteddu identifies the city with the city’s fortified castle built during the rule of Pisa. Other scholars think that the name Casteddu is much older, going back to the very beginnings of Roman rule, and is nothing but the translation into Latin of popular Karalis. The two place names survived, the one as the official name of the Municipium (municipality) until today, the other as a literal translation of the Latin which became prevalent in common parlance when pre-Latin languages became extinct in the city and throughout the whole island.
Sardinian looks quite interesting; we discussed its prehistory last year.
How do you parse filindeu? In particular, what’s the -n-? My understanding is that Sardinian uses analytical de to make noun compounds.
All I know about Sardinian is what I read in
the funny papersWikipedia, so I’ll let someone with actual information do the parsing.