Amber Bernstein

In America this must be a not uncommon female name. But do you Americans see the fun thing about it?
In German "Bernstein" means "amber"....

In addition...it is rather strange to name a girl after a stone you can find on a Baltic beach...

Hell, when I looked at that name, that just looked like any boring old name, at least for names here, overall.

May be people who gave the name Amber Bernstein didn't know that 'Bernstein' means 'Amber'..
And as far as naming a kid goes, parents have been more than cruel naming there kids like 'Euthanasia' and 'Marina Fish'. Just google for 'weird names' and you'll see that Amber is certainly a pretty normal name.

That sounds like a Jewish name. They have some interesting names. At school there's this one Jewish guy whose last name is Kirchenbaum (church tree) lol

I can assure you it's pretty normal, and not related to any religion since I've met many people named Amber that were many different religions/ nonreligions (including atheist and agnostic).

I think Ed was referring to "Bernstein."

Fredrik, in the same vein as "Amber Bernstein," my mother used to live on Prospect Avenue in San Francisco. My Russian friends thought it was funny because "Prospekt" is the Russian word for avenue.

Once I heard a Russian woman in SF speaking Russian, and she mentioned "ulitsa Geary Street" ("ulitsa" means street in Russian).

I thought the Russian translation of "West Side Story" was funny. I thought the obvious thing would be to translate it as "Story of/from the West Side." Instead, they considered "West Side" to be an untranslatable name and attached a Russian adjectival ending, resulting in "Vestsaidskaya Storia" (pronounce the vowels as in Italian).

Ed:
Of course directly translated from german "Kirchenbaum" means "church tree". But I guess it could also be a misspelling of "Kirschenbaum" (with an extra s), which means "cherry tree"!

I really would not be surprised if it was "Kirschenbaum" myself, as that'd probably make much more sense in this case. Also, one must remember that in some German dialects, "ch" is /S/ rather than /x/ and /C/, so as a result it could have easily been confused by someone who wrote it down at some point, and then just happened to stick for whatever reason.

Oh, it does have an "s"...Well, in this case "cherry tree" isn't as interesting as "church tree" lol

Tiffany, I was referring to Bernstein.

Oops, my apologies. And I agree about "Bernstein" sounding particularly Jewish.

I once read something in a Bill Bryson book about the English language about Jews in Germany or Austria being forced to adopt really disgusting last names in the 18th century or something, like:
Goldwein = golden wine = urine
Maybe Bernstein is something similar. Amber is yellow, after all.

And then when the Jews were allowed to move out of the ghettos etc. they changed their names into something nice-smelling like Blumberg = Bloomberg = flower mounatin

But there are so many strange first names in the US, like:
Dean - why name a kid after the head priest of a cathedral?
Heather - why a moor bush?
Holly - why a Christmas decoration?
Clark - why an office worker?

Don't ask, as I bet most people from the US, myself included, wouldn't know. But I'd suspect that such was probably due to people being more willing to give their names more nontraditional names here, for whatever reason (but likely due to less social restrictions upon such as whole), and some of these just happened to stick.

I'm sure there are some pretty weird names in Norwegian also. Maybe because I come from a very German area, Bernstein doesn't seem very Jewish as much as just German. And Amber is a common name among girls/women under the age of about 30. Fred, you're overthinking this naming thing.