Or in this case, a nut for About.com (though there are several others), which, as I expected to find in my deeper spelunking, upends the JFK donut story as overblown, even frames it as a myth — though I would hardly say this ranks up there with Nessie in Scotland, bubble-eyed E.T.’s in Area 51 or even 30-foot alligators sloshing beneath the streets of Manhattan (let’s not rule that one out just yet).
“No one laughed at or misunderstood President Kennedy’s words spoken in German. In fact, he had been provided help from translators who knew the language well. He wrote out the key phrase phonetically [see my previous blog entry with the photo of his crib sheet] and practiced it before his speech … and his words were warmly received. Yet this German myth has been perpetuated by teachers of German and other people who should know better” (About.com).
The source goes on to point out that in Berlin a jelly donut is actually called ein Pfannkuchen (literally, pancake), not ein Berliner. So really what we’re talking about here is context and perceptual biases, and if I think of all the times someone (even German) has scrambled the English language in a gallant attempt to communicate way outside of their native tongue but I still understood them, well, again, it’s all about context.
Now, even though I have recently tried my hand, er, mouth at Vietnamese and Japanese (no doubt sounding like the proverbial Village Idiot in my goodnatured attempts), still to this day I won’t even attempt to speak French in France beyond, say, casual salutations. But that’s a story for another day and a plate or deux of les trois gourmandes in front of me (Ich bin ein gluttonous Amerikaner, nein?).
Posted by: Colin Mangham