So I've been told. If memory serves, the way it was put to me back when I was taking introductory German (where, unsurprisingly, we discussed this very issue, though most of the kids in the class had no idea what Herr Tozier and I were talking about) was that you leave out the indefinite article in sentences where you're saying you're a particular sort of person - "I'm a Berliner," "I'm a foreigner," "I'm an airplane mechanic," that sort of thing, but leave it in if you're speaking metaphorically ("I'm a busy bee today"). Ordinarily, JFK leaving "ein" in there would've just seemed like a minor grammatical blunder, but unfortunately there's a food item called a Berliner, so it came across as if he were going for some abstruse jelly-donut metaphor. If he had been speaking in Stuttgart everything would've been fine. (... But not Hamburg. Or Frankfurt. Or Vienna.)

All in all, he'd have been better off saying Ich komme aus Berlin ("I come from Berlin"). That's not a common way of saying that sort of thing in German, but it at least means what he meant.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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