Am I the only person who says EP-STINE not EP-STEEN? [View all]

I can't help it, because "Epstein" is a German name, and Germans would never say "Ep-STEEN." It's against my training/learning to say it incorrectly.

Any German word that has the "ei" letter combination is always pronounced as Long-I.
Stein, Heimlich, Klein, Nein ... these are words that almost any American can pronounce correctly, even if they don't speak German.

The German language is rich with "ei" words and almost all of them are pronounced with the Long-I. At the moment I can't think of a single word that doesn't, unless it was imported from English or another language.

And every day I hear the name pronounced on the news media as "EP-STEEN" and of course this only reinforces the error.