Su filindeu, Cagliari.

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…