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Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim wrote:
Harlan Messinger wrote:
Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim wrote:
The German word for stone ,,Stein" is used in German very widely in
combinations particularly with proper names like surnames, names of
streets....
1. The combination of some words like Bernstein is clear to me but I
can't understand a name like Einstein "one stone".
2. Germany is not that mountainous so why this overuse of "Stein"(
maybe particularly in the north?) Any historic explanation?
1. "Stein" means "stone", not "mountain", so what do mountains have to
do with it?
2. Much of the region where *German is spoken* is mountainous.
1. You may have noticed the meaning of Stein is known to me.
Yes, and then you suddenly switched to "mountain" without explanation,
as though the two were synonymous.
Yes,
Germany id full of stones if you mean Switzerland and part of Austria
or south Germany. Does this explain the overuse of "Stein"?
Family names of geographical origin are typically based on prominent
local features. Mountains are prominent, are they not? And if there were
even only one in a given area, wouldn't that make it *more* prominent?
> There
are other regions in the world much more mountainous. Is there no link?
If someone were to choose the name Rosenstein because of the one
rose-covered mountain near his home, do you think he'd check first
whether maybe there were more mountains in Tibet than in his own area?
Of course not. That has nothing to do with it.
2. What does the name Einstein mean?
I don't know. Is it necessarily "ein" + "stein"? I've wondered whether
it's a variant of Eisenstein.
3. A mineral water is called: Gerolsteinerstein. (I hope I wrote it
correctly) here the use of Stein is even trippled (Geroel + two times
Stein).
It's just Gerolsteiner, at least in the stores where it's sold in my
part of the US. No third "stein". As for the duplication, if "-stein" is
used to name mountains, then this means "rocky mountain". As opposed to
a softly sloping grass-covered mountain. No surprise there.
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