One More Time on the Origin of Russian Supir, Superik ‘Ring’

The article focuses on the origin and functioning of the word supir, which means ‘a ring with a stone or glass insert’, and its variants (supirchik, superik, etc.) These problems were already discussed in detail by I. G. Dobrodomov on the pages of “Voprosy jazykoznanija” in 2009. The cases of its use (mainly in fiction) were presented there and the conclusions were drawn about the borrowed nature of these words. The author argued that they originated from the French soupir ‘sigh’ which actualized the idea of a ring as a memorable gift. We believe that this version lacks semantic and sociolinguistic foundations. We add extensive dialect materials with a wide geography of fixations to the already available data on the use of these words and propose a version about their native origin within the word family pir- / per- / por- (derivatives of Proto-Slavic *perti, *pyrǫ), to which, for instance, belongs the word zaperet’ (‘to lock’) in modern Russian. Thus, the internal form of these words reflects that the stone ‘is locked’ in the ring, that is, the word focuses on the fixation of the stone in the ring, which is an essential characteristic of this piece of jewelry.