Mark Feuerstein, Harvey Fierstein, Leonard Bernstein... STEEN? STINE?

[arwalden]

Are there any rules so that one automatically knows whether the surname is pronounced "--steen" or "--stine"?

Or are there no rules at all... and it's just based on the personal preference of the family or of the individual?

-- Allen

[gmoney]

1. Bruce Springsteen?

[hyphenate]

2. From what I remember of high school German

It's the way the combo of "i" and "e" are placed.

If it's "ie" in a name, it's usually "steen"

If it's "ei" in a name, it's usually "stine"

But that was a while back, and the rules may have changed.

[starroute]

3. If it's Jewish or German, "ei" is pronounced as in Einstein

The "ie" combination, which is a lot less common, is pronounced "ee," as in the name of the great mathematical genius, Norbert Wiener.

Remember Einstein and Wiener and you can't go wrong.

(Springsteen is a Dutch name, so that's different.)

[REP]

7. Not That DIfferent

The Dutch "Steen" and Geman "Stein" both mean "Stone."

[mitchum]

4. Read Tom Wolfe's "Radical Chic" for a treatise on...

the correct pronunciation of "Leonard Bernstein"
Hilarious.

[Kat45]

5. Oh yeah, I remember that treatise. n/t

[wickerwoman]

6. If they're following German rules you pronounce the second letter.

"ie" you pronounce like the letter "e"
"ei" you pronounce like the letter "i"

So they should all be "stine"s but God knows what happened at Ellis Island. My last name is Irish but my "American" pronunciation of it doesn't exist in Ireland.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. It depends on whether the family uses

the German or the Yiddish pronunciation.

I learned about this when I saw the movie Hester Street back in the 1970s. It's about Jewish immigrants in the early 1900s, and there's a character in it named Bernstein pronounced "Bairn-shteen." The German pronunciation would be "Bairn-shtyne."

At the time I had a professor who was both Jewish and a fourth-generation New Yorker, so I asked him about this, since I knew people who pronounced their names "Epsteen" and "Goldsteen."

He explained that Yiddish is an offshoot of medieval German with a lot of Hebrew and Slavic words mixed in. The two languages underwent different sound changes over the years, so even though the basic vocabulary comes from the same roots, it may be pronounced differently.

The Yiddish-influenced pronunciation, therefore, is "-shteen" or "-steen," but "-styne" is the German-influenced pronunciation.