How do you explain Oscar Hammerstein II, American lyricist and Kurt von Hammerstein, head general of the German army at the time Hitler was made Chancellor? The American was Jewish, the German was not. I’ve heard Oscar’s name as both -stine and -steen on TV.
California’s Senator Diane Feinstein has always been pronounced “Fine-Stine”, from all that I’ve ever heard (typically from news readers on TV or radio).
– Senegoid (I pronounce it Seen-a-gwad.)
Back in the 1970s my mother worked for Lerner Shops and her regional manager was named Schleicher. I know that name as the last or next to last Chancellor of the Weimar Republic before Hitler. In German it sounds like Schl-I-ker with a long I sound, but this Lerner Shop manager was Jewish and pronounced the name as Sl-a-ker with a short a sound. You’d never get that sound from the German spelling.
It’s interesting how persistent this myth of officials changing immigrants’ names is when the US, unlike most countries, don’t have a central government register with an official spelling, and when anyone familiar with old records will observe first hand that spelling was still somewhat erratic for names well into the 20th century.
Someone else might have heard this explanation and not piped up in this thread yet, but I can say with a strong level of confidence that it’s not true: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ellis-island-isnt-blame-your-familys-name-change-180953832/?no-ist
“Myth” is true if you mean a history that has entered culture as a defining and significant identification. “Myth” as a synonym for “not true,” no (in fact, the more general and factual definition, “lies that tell the truth” is also not necessarily true here). It is a thread in Jewish myth and culture since the earliest days of “travel”: a Midrash (?-cite needed) from the 2nd century tells us out of the the vast majority of slaves under Pharoah, only the few who didn’t change their names merited, and were given, the way out. I understand Nava’s implication, that the myth/fact of changing one’s name under your own volition is one prevalent around the world. (From the earliest Jewish Patriarchs, for the Jews.)
Back to now, the thread “Question about USA (NYC) in the 1920s” goes into this. Question about USA (NYC) in the 1910s - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board
Because no joke gets told once, and I’m too lazy–and the joke about the prisoners who tell jokes by reciting their index numbers is appropriate here–I’ll cite myself: (Explanation and translation of punchline in original thread–one’s need for which speaks to Nava’s point.)
(Transliteration adjusted from original. Some word changes for style.)
FWIW, a friend once told me–with a Jew’s time-honored hypersensitivity to such matters–how in Germany in the 1950s he particularly remembered being asked if the “…man” ending his last name was spelled with one “m” or two, in an attempt to determine if he was “a real German” or not.
I don’t know. Onomastics of the Jewish people is particularly hairy. I think I’ve been told that the “…sky” ending my wife’s last name is a sign to Poles that she is a Jew, as opposed to “…ski.”
I have no idea.
On pronouncing Lenny the conductor’s name, I believe the following, from an authoritative site, is dispositive: Jew or Not Jew: Leonard Bernstein
And is it 'fraink’enstein or 'fronk’enstein?
Which reminds me of the (justifiable–which is your joke) muttering when President Obama went around saying “Pockistan,” which nobody says in the USA, to be sensitive to their hearing, presumably.
I think he dropped it after a few years.
- I think you Americans would have a huge challenge if you wanted to pronounce each and every family name correctly, according to the costum in the originating country. And the whatever-steins would be one of the lesser of your problems.
As stated several times: go for whatever the name barer uses himself and leave it at that.
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This reminds of a very stupid thread I once read on some neo nazi or such forum (one gets bored sometimes …). OP asked how he could spot a Jewish background in family names. So all the other dimwits came up with -feld, -baum, -berg etc. Which, as you may or may not know, are just common German words in family names (field, tree, mountain). Stein btw (or Steen in Dutch) literally means stone, but usually referred to stone house or castle.
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I feel sorry for all the Weiners
Remember Allan Sherman’s song “Shake Hands with Your Uncle Max”?
One verse ended with “Stein with an ‘e-i’ and Styne with a ‘y’!” 
How is that relevant to the myth, as in not true, of names being changed by immigration officials? This was a day and age when people were changing their names in whatever manner they liked to fit into a new country and the government didn’t mind at all.
But what about German Jews?
I think just about everybody accepts this to be a self-evident truth, but even that doesn’t help when various third parties pronounce the name either way. Rubenstein, of course, is a good example, and I’ve heard Epstein pronounced both ways.
Another likely source of confusion is that, historically, there wasn’t just one German language, but a dialect continuum over that region of northern and central Europe, and this covered most of the area between Denmark, Poland, Italy, France, and the North Sea. In modern Dutch as well as northern dialects of German, the word for “stone”, on which those names are based, isn’t Stein but Steen. This vowel in this word certainly doesn’t rhyme with “green” in English, but it is definitely a lot closer to that sound than it is to the diphthong heard in the standard German word. So in many instances I’m sure the “steen” pronunciation in names wasn’t just the result of lackadaisical immigration officers or a well-meaning attempt of the family itself to fit in; rather it was the way that syllable was regularly pronounced in the region from which the family came.
I’m not sure I understand. Isn’t it the same diphthong in both words? OTOH if you mean vowel length (duration), then I concede that there’s usually a distinction there.
In German, it’s pronounced “shtine”; in Yiddish I think it’s more likely to have been more like “shtayn”; if it’s Dutch, it will be spelt “steen” and pronounced somewhere between “shteen” and “shtayn”. So it probably all depends on where the family originally came from, as well as whether they pronounced the local language with an accent, and how they chose to pronounce it in English, bearing in mind what they might have felt necessary to aid assimilation, or to assert their identity.
Nein.
This topic in general and in specific is discussed deeply–with the clarity only an argument can bring out–in the following movie scene set in a barber shop (Eddie Murphy plays a number of the characters). The entire scene is extraordinarily funny, which is why I’m not giving internal time cites for the specific dialogue.
I don’t understand this. In German spelling, two vowels next to each other aren’t separate sounds, together they make another sound. “E” on its own is either a schwa or something like a short “eh”, and “I” on its own is somewhere between the English “in” or “ee”; but together as “EI” they make the same sound (more or less) as the English “eye”. Likewise, in German “eu” isn’t more “oo” than “eh”, it’s “oy”.