Some years ago I had a native German explain to me that what JFK said really did mean "I'm a jelly donut," and he should have said "Ich bin Berliner." So YMMV.
Yes. And it's nice for a sterile Wikipedia page to offer the idea that there was only one way for JFK to say it, and that he did it correctly.
However! What I supplied was (one anecdote of) the reaction of a native German speaker who heard the line themselves. Their reaction was in line with the supposed myth. So no matter how smugly people today might denounce that as a myth, there were those in the intended audience whose reactions were exactly in line with the supposed myth. Which, of course, makes it not so much of a myth.
Eddie Izzard made the best comparison to help it click: if a resident of Frankfurt were to hear "I am a Frankfurter", it still makes perfect sense, even if it also means "I am a hot dog".
The correct English transliteration would be more like "vienner" which pretty closely follows the common English practice of adding an -er suffix to denote someone's place of origin.
The false claim is that anyone in attendance mistook Kennedy's statement to mean anything other than "I am a person from Berlin." It is equally false to claim that Kennedy misspoke or made a gaffe in this speech. Only later was this double meaning of the word 'Berliner' pointed out by comedians.
The sad part is that there are people who insist that one can hear audience members laughing at that moment in recordings of the speech. Nope, just cheering.
It's still somewhat false though, from that wikipedia link:
> Here is where President Kennedy announced, Ich bin ein Berliner, and thereby amused the city's populace because in the local parlance a Berliner is a doughnut.
and
> What they did not know, but could easily have found out, was that such citizens never refer to themselves as 'Berliners.'
In Berlin itself, a Berliner is actually called "Pfannkuchen", so while it might have amused other Germans, that wouldn't apply to citizens of Berlin themselves, which do in fact call themselves "Berliner".
> While called Berliner (Ballen) in Northern and Western Germany as well as in Switzerland, the Berliners themselves and residents of Brandenburg, Western Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt and Saxony know them as Pfannkuchen, which in the rest of Germany generally means pancakes; pancakes are known there as Eierkuchen ("egg cakes").
See also JFK's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, which is often (falsely) claimed to be German for "I'm a Jelly Donut". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner#Jelly_doug...