Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Contributor A:

MythBusters: Special Donut Edition

Did Kennedy really say he was a jelly donut?

This came up in the comments, and I tried to reply there, but MT wouldn't let me, flagging words like "was" and "way" as "questionable content". Huh? Anyway, I have the power, for one week only, to clear this up in a main post.

Kennedy told the audience in Berlin "Ich bin ein Berliner." Nouns derived from a place name in German, used in this kind of sentence, don't normally take the indefinite article ein. Standard German is Ich bin Berliner, Ich bin Deutscher, Ich bin Amerikaner, etc. If you learned any German in elementary school, you might have learned the ditty "Ich bin Ausländer und spreche nicht gut deutsch." Ausländer comes from Ausland, "abroad", and so takes no ein.

By contrast, if you want to say that you are an inanimate object, you would use the indefinite article ein: "Kein Mensch ist eine Insel" -- "No man is an island."

So when Kennedy used the ein, everyone knew what he meant--in the audio, you can hear a hearty cheer--but it did kind of sound like he was referring to himself as the donut known as a Berliner. Some say you can hear laughs in the cheers. I leave it to you to decide.

UPDATE!: One of the comments links to an About.com piece quoting a German linguist saying that the indefinite article "ein" can and should be used when you are identifying yourself or someone else as metaphorically a member of a group like "Berliners". Under this logic, Kennedy was right to say "Ich bin ein Berliner." To have said "Ich bin Berliner" would have been to say that he was literally from Berlin.

Quite so, it seems, and this subtlety never dawned on me in my student year in Germany. Googling "Ich bin ein Bayer", "I am a Bavarian", turns up in the first few hits, this exchange between an interviewer and his subject:

[Interviewer]: Daß ich ein Norddeutscher bin, habe ich erst bemerkt, als ich nach Bayern kam, indem ich eben Nichtbayer war.

Prof. Hoyer:
Ich denke ja. Es ist mir ziemlich bald aufgefallen, daß alle sich hier als Bayern fühlen. "Ich bin ein Bayer aus Überzeugung", habe ich hier oft gehört.

Interviewer: "I first noticed that I was a north German when I came to Bavaria, in that I wasn't Bavarian."

Prof. Hoyer: "I think so. It occured to me quickly that everyone feels Bavarian here. "I'm a Bavarian by conversion," I've often heard here.

[Emphasis and translation mine.]

Donut myth status: debunked! Well done, President Kennedy, and well done, commenters.

Posted by Contributor A at July 28, 2005 05:42 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links