A University of Oregon linguist has found strong evidence to support claims by astronaut Neil Armstrong that he really said “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” when he first stepped on the moon.
U of O assistant professor of linguistics Melissa Baese-Berk says she wanted to apply her research on the challenge of hearing speech in adverse conditions to a real world situation… like the muffled recording of a man on the moon.
Armstrong recording: “That’s one small step for (a) man. One giant leap for mankind.”
Neil Armstrong long maintained that he had said “a man”. While Baese-Berk’s research doesn’t definitively prove that, it shows it to be likely. She and her team analyzed how much the words ‘for’ and ‘for a’ can overlap acoustically in speech. Baese-Berk says the ‘a’ changes the meaning of the quote to something more humble.
Baese-Berk: “And I think the meaning of ‘for a’ is probably closer to what he intended and closer to how we sort of interpret this. And I think it’s worth also saying that NASA for years and years, when they print the quote anywhere they print it with the ‘a’ in parentheses.”
The study is in the publication PLOS ONE.
