Bei mir bist du schön means that you’re grand.

A new bother to-day, and it has to do with the pronunciation of schön.

Schön, alternatively transliterated as schoen, is a German word meaning “beautiful”. The vowel ö in schön is, in technical terms, a close-mid front rounded vowel, and it does not exist natively in English. One way for an English speaker to pronounce it is to hold the vowel “eh” (as in “day”) while rounding her lips as if she were saying “oh”. Not everybody goes this far. Other English-language renditions of the ö vowel have included “oo” as in “book”, “er” as in “sherbet”, “oh” as in “show”, and more rarely “oo” as in “soon”. Sometimes if it is transliterated as schoen I have heard it as two vowels (“show-in”).

None of this is even close to “Shane”.

But in their 1937 hit “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön”, the Andrews Sisters rhyme schön with explain. Essentially it’s “Shane”. “By meer bist du Shane.” I’m not sure where this interpretation of the vowel ö came from.

The other occurrence of oe being pronounced as “ay” that I know of is the surname of Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons and Futurama. It’s not “Groaning”, but “Gray-ning”. So this is not an isolated phenomenon, but a commonly accepted pronunciation of oe in modern English. When you see oe, you say “ay”.

I just did my research. There is no Wikipedia article for “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön”, but there is one for “Bei Mir Bistu Shein”, which it turns out is the original Yiddish title of the song, as it is from a 1932 Yiddish musical, I Would If I Could. The article notes that “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” was the Germanised spelling of the title, and the spelling under which the Andrews Sisters had their 1937 hit.

Aha! So the Andrews Sisters are actually singing “Bei mir bistu shein”, and that’s what rhymes with “explain”! And although they retained the Yiddish pronunciation in their recording, which preserves the rhyme with “explain”, for some reason they used the German title.

This still doesn’t explain why Matt Groening’s name is pronounced “Gray-ning”. But it’s a name, and I guess the supreme arbiter of how a name is pronounced is the actual bearer of the name, so “Gray-ning” it is. This also makes it effectively a shibboleth for discerning true Simpsons and Futurama fans.

Okay I have a crazy theory. What if the complicated Yiddish-German history of “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” is actually the reason the “ay” pronunciation of oe came to be? What if a generation grew up hearing Bei mir bist du schoen / Again I’ll explain, and they collectively agreed that the German oe is pronounced “ay”? What if this is how Groening came to be pronounced “Gray-ning”?