Tree-Dwelling Bears, Spelling, and Phonetics. What Fun!

Here's a fun article I ran across, from Seventeen magazine blog post in August 2015.  Please read it, then come back here for my comments.

My two cents come from a rather tedious, technical point of view, because that's how I operate.  Love me, love my technicalities!

The Berenstain Bears, to my recollection, were definitely spelled with the a in the final syllable.  (Granted, I began reading in 1978, so I can't actually vouch for prior to then). To me, the name stood out as recognizably Anglicized, from -stein to -stain.  Many years later, I know it's more complex than that--in German it may have been spelled with other letters and/or vowels which don't exist in English.

If it had been spelled Berenstein all along, then all along we would very likely have been pronouncing it "Bear-en-stine". Yet we have not been saying it that way.

Admittedly, there are people who say "Bear-en-steen".  To me that indicates they are visualizing it in their mind spelled Berenstein.  That's a perfectly natural inclination, to make it German in appearance, to match the overall German-ness that it evokes.

If it had been spelled Berenstein, American readers who ran across it could pronounce it either "Bear-en-stine" or "Bear-en-steen". One could even argue that some people might say "Bear-en-stain" because they are leaning towards the idea of German names with -oe pronounced as -ay, such as Boehner (pronounced "Bayner"), or Koenig (pronounced "Kaynig").  Since Berenstein contains -ei, not -oe, that is a weak argument, but it's not baseless.

In practice, people either say "stain" because they've seen it spelled with -a, or they say "steen" because they've seen -stain but re-visualized it to something more familiar or authentic to their minds. But the fact that pretty much no one goes around saying "stine" supports my claim that it was "always" spelled with an a.

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A tangent for another day: How did the name look and sound in German?  What's the likely path for it to have been Anglicized to -stain?  Perhaps its German bearers pronounced it as something close to "stain", and then it was transcribed in a way that approximated it for an American palate.  Probably need a German teacher for insight on that!