Entire cultural entities, back in the old days when lingusists were still anthropologists, could be classified (probably too arbitrarily) in this way, where in one setting speakers did little of the work and the listeners had to work harder, but in other settings, the opposite was true.

When we humans speak on radios, I get the impression that everyone is working extra hard because of the interference. Also, if there is a dispatcher or central voice of some kind, I think the dispatcher or equivalent works harder and those out on the periphery don’t work very hard at all. To see for yourself, listen to a police band radio for a while.

Dispatcher: “Unit 41, code 11 at Main and Fourth.”

Unit 41: “KSshhhhs blorp bleep. Ain orth.”

That sort of thing.

Some of this has to do with the quality of the radio signal coming from some places. So, when human astronauts are out visiting other planets, you can get this effect as well.

Houston: Thirteen, we’ve got one more item for you, when you get a chance. We’d like you to stir up your cyro tanks. In addition, I have a shaft and trunnion –

Apollo 13: Ksshsh Kay

Houston: ..for looking at the Comet Bennett, if you need it.

Apollo 13: Bleep blorp k standby

(Loud explosion)

Apollo 13: Kssh k ooson i elieve we’ve had a problem herksshh.

Houston: This is Houston. Say again, please.

Apollo 13: Oh ksssh Houston we’ve had a problem blorp. Ba bee bee a boblrt undervolt.

Houston: Roger. Main B undervolt. OK stand by 13, we’re looking at it.

(Oddly, from this point on in that historic transmission between Earth and Outer Space, the words from the Apollo 13 astonauts start to become clearer than the words from Houston. As though Houston had it’s hands over the mouthpiece for a while.)

Which brings us to Neil Armstrong’s moonlanding quote. What did he say exactly?

Well, being a human, I am quite certain that I know what he said and what he meant. This is what he said:

“That’s one small step for man, one diant leap for mankind.”

But this is probably a better transcription of what he said:

“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

What he meant by that:

“So one guy can hop off the foot pad of a Lunar Landing module, no biggie, but in this case, this is a huge leap forward in the history of our species since we are now walking around on another planet. Albeit one circling our own, not like we just landed on Jupiter or something.”

So it is likely that what we actually heard was:

“One small step for BLORP man, one DORPiant leap for mankind”

Where I have substituted nonsense for the missing or messed parts.

To deal with this apparent ambiguity, NASA has generally written the quote as following, provisionally adding the indefinite article and converting “diant” to “giant.”

“That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”

And now, a team of linguists writing in PLoS ONE report that even though we couldn’t hear it, Armstrong probably did say “a” before “man.” From the abstract of the paper:

Neil Armstrong insisted that his quote upon landing on the moon was misheard, and that he had said one small step for a man, instead of one small step for man. What he said is unclear in part because function words like a can be reduced and spectrally indistinguishable from the preceding context. Therefore, their presence can be ambiguous, and they may disappear perceptually depending on the rate of surrounding speech. Two experiments are presented examining production and perception of reduced tokens of for and for a in spontaneous speech. Experiment 1 investigates the distributions of several acoustic features of for and for a. The results suggest that the distributions of for and for a overlap substantially, both in terms of temporal and spectral characteristics. Experiment 2 examines perception of these same tokens when the context speaking rate differs. The perceptibility of the function word a varies as a function of this context speaking rate. These results demonstrate that substantial ambiguity exists in the original quote from Armstrong, and that this ambiguity may be understood through context speaking rate.

Now, there is yet another interpretation. Here’s audio of the actual event.

Here is my interpretation of what actually happened. The words Armstrong said are in bold. The words that were only in his head are in italics.

And I’ll step off the LEM now.

Holy fuck. The moon.

That’s one small step for BLORP man.

Crap, did I just leave out the “a.” Not sure. Should I say it again? No, that would be worse. Maybe I just said it real fast. Whatever. Everybody will get what I mean. This will not be a controversy.

One giant leap for mankind.

Holy fuck. The moon.

So, that controversy, if it ever was a controversy, has been dealt a mighty blow.

Happy 40th Anniversary, Landing On the Moon.

(details here)

We’ve been burned by this one before. As you will recall, the claim was made that the visuals we all saw of the first steps on the moon by humans were a black and white compressed image sent from Australia, shown on a TV at Mission Control (or someplace) and then shot with an old fashioned TV camera (they only had the “old fashioned” ones back in those days, of course).

But, we were told, high quality color videos were taken at the same time but then lost right away. Then, we were told, they were found.

Then we were told by other people who seemed to know what they were talking about that these higher quality tapes did not exist, could not have existed, because the camera needed to make them was not sent to the moon on that first trip.

Well, now we have something directly fro NASA:

WASHINGTON — NASA will hold a media briefing at 11 a.m. EDT on Thursday, July 16, at the Newseum in Washington to release greatly improved video imagery from the July 1969 live broadcast of the Apollo 11 moonwalk.

The release will feature 15 key moments from Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s historic moonwalk using what is believed to be the best available broadcast-format copies of the lunar excursion, some of which had been locked away for nearly 40 years. The initial video released Thursday is part of a comprehensive Apollo 11 moonwalk restoration project expected to be completed by the fall.

The Newseum is located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. N.W. The news conference will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s Internet homepage.

source

It will be very interesting to go back and examine what everyone has said in relation to what actually happens. This NASA news release says nothing about color, for instance. Nor does it say anything about “lost” tapes … just that tapes were in the archive.

So, it is quite possible that the original story is sorta true … that what was sent out for all to see during the event was crap (for reasons described, more or less) but it wasn’t lost, just not shown (or maybe it was lost and NASA prefers to use the term “in the archives” for “we lost it”).

Why didn’t they just show the higher quality tapes back in those days, like, after the astronauts returned or at some other time? Well, if you recall, and you probably don’t, this whole obsession with quality on the video screen simply did not exist back in those days. We felt lucky to have a magic moving picture box at all. Many people had Black and White TV’s even in the late 1960s, and a very large percentgae of American households did not even have a TV at all.

OK, well, actually, in 1970, just over 90 percent of housholds in the US had a TV, but fewer than 10 percent had a color TV, according to this.

I guess we shall see. Or not.