Neil Armstrong’s now world famous words to the world on 20 July, 1969, were spoken to the world “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” But nearly forty years on, the world famous words are unclear. Was Armstrong insisting that he had indeed intended to say “one small step for a man,” and did, or had the indefinite article en route fallen away? The event has intrigued linguists, historians, and space enthusiasts in general, and one cannot help but marvel at hearing, reception as sounds, in words, and the long after life of the Apollo 11 mission.
Armstrong himself explained his intention. “The ‘a’ was intended,” he clarified in a 1999 30th Anniversary commemoration. He did concede, however, that he couldn’t replicate the article’s evil aspects and claimed, “I’ll be happy if you just put it in parentheses.” His claim was validated when a 2006 report compiled by computer programmer Peter Shann Ford, employing advanced computer programs to replay Armstrong’s radio broadcast’s waveforms. Ford spaced the words “for” and “man” 35 milliseconds apart, and he took it as proof of the missing “a.” Armstrong was persuaded to Ford’s conclusion, telling us, “I find his conclusion persuasive. Persuasive is the appropriate word.”
We can be convinced, but there is always a doubt. Language research has shown that function words like “a” are becoming economical or coarticulated in spontaneous speech, spectrally indistinguishable from the subsequent sounds. Researchers, in their 2016 PLOS ONE paper, attempted the process and compared the spectral and temporal contours of “for” and “for a.” Professionals are of the opinion that the two words have highly overlapping spectral and temporal patterns, which result in misperceptions. In addition, Armstrong’s increased speech rate for words, and his slowed down speech rate context, would have worked to create vagueness.
This subtle impact on speech rate is itself a strong force. Silent syllables are harder to perceive when context is spoken at slower speech rates. In Armstrong’s case, the comparatively shorter length of “for (a)” compared to the rest of his sentence may have caused “a” to sound silent. Authors say that “Neil Armstrong’s sentence could well have been a ‘perfect storm’ of circumstances, which collectively caused the listener to hear ‘for’ instead of his intended ‘for a.'”
Armstrong’s best quote cited, also, is wondering how to listen for sound 240,000 miles. Sound message traveled 240,000 miles from the moon to the earth and got stuck in microphones and into 650 million human ears. 1960s technology and Armstrong’s habit of not uttering vowels when talking make more impossibility of achieving this question.
Appropriately, Armstrong himself never even wondered about the down to earth phrasing of the words. “It wasn’t a very complex thing. It was what it was,” he swore in a 2001 NASA oral history interview. Naivety of all of that doesn’t explain the richness of the words. Whatever had or had not been an “a” there, the words had grasped the scale of human effort and reach for space travel. As NASA suggested, “The important point is that the world had no problem understanding his meaning.” The following quote of Armstrong’s moon landing is another example of technological use in history interpretation and recording.
Ford’s translation, which he obtained from computer program code utilized to enable a disabled person to communicate through nerve impulses, is a breakthrough for the use of computer hardware in history. Likewise, some researchers at Michigan State University contrasted Armstrong’s speech and Ohio dialectology in the state of Ohio and concluded that speakers in the state will shorten “for a” to one sound. Those who would appropriate the second glance may access Armstrong’s radio broadcast. Using audio software such as Audacity, the fans have slowed down the audio recording in the suspenseful scenes, turned up the volume in a bid to capture every minute detail. All these are not just learning on Armstrong’s terms but also reminding us how thin the line between technology, language, and human sensitivities Lastly, Armstrong’s own testimony is the greatest proof of the enduring power of sound bites to encapsulate the spirit of history.
For now that a writer has so nicely shortened it, Armstrong could simply have said ‘We landed,’ and all the proper grammar in the world, or Milky Way, for that matter, would not have made that line memorable. The mission, the victory, the glory of Apollo 11 still encourage subsequent generations of us to bear in mind that giant leaps are best begun by the smallest step. Whatever Armstrong has uttered one has heard, “for man” or “for a man,” scandal compels us to reflect on how thin is human language and how giant an achievement it was to have walked on the moon. As if sworn to by Armstrong himself, “It was what it was.” To watch Armstrong’s acoustic analysis of this quote, see this demo of speech perception. To listen to the original recording, see NASA’s audio archive. And to learn more about Ford’s experiment, see this NPR interview.
