Re: German "Stein"

[naddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Christian Weisgerber)]

Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim <Jdibrahim@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > > 1. The combination of some words like Bernstein is clear to me
> >
> > It is? So--rhetoric question--what's a "Bern"?
> 
> As far as I know dear Christian "bern" goes back to a middle German
> word for burn, hence a burnable type of stone.

Yes, that's what you find when you look it up in an etymological
dictionary.  To your average German, this is not transparent and
the "Bern-" part is a bound morpheme that occurs only in this single
word.

> I could at least get an idea because in particular its colour
> suggests some kind of electricity

Fascinating.

> but now again what's Einstein? We haven't still found a satisfactory
> explanation for the first part of the word.

Ask some genealogists.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx