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Interesting fact of the day: The first words spoken on the moon was "That's one small step for _A_ man, one giant leap for man kind". However due to a misinterpretation he has always been consistently misquoted as saying "..one small step for man..."
@valleyforge @freemo They did, and he did mean to say "a", but I don't think that was ever the question.
I think the question was always whether he accidentally said "for man", flubbing his line.
@freemo no this is not the true... First words pronounced on the moon where:
Maaaan! Allmost crashed but here we are alive in the moon! Let's go out for a walk! And then Amstrong exit the Eagle and steped down and bla bla bla, the well known speech...😂
@freemo I have listened to that I don't know how many times since that day in 1969, and for the life of me I cannot hear "a man". I'm sure that was the script, but I'm equally certain Armstrong bungled it. Not that I fault him a bit! I probably would have just stood there in awe, forgetting everything.
@twdockery Its not that armstrong mubundled it, its because static kicked in and you cant hear the word "a", which is why there is a small pause right where the word should be.
@freemo What misinterpretation? I feel like the quote has always been interpreted as meaning "one small step for A man", since if you leave out the "a" the whole phrase doesn't make sense (since "man" and "mankind" are synonyms).
I thought that the main controversy was whether he misspoke (i.e. forgot to say "a"), the "a" was lost in static or possibly that in his accent "for a man" runs together and the "a" gets elided.
Someone (Peter Ford Shannon) wrote a paper about it, arguing that he indeed say "a"; the PDF is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20061123073155/http://www.controlbionics.com/images_EEPRa/Electronic%20Evidence%20and%20Physiological%20Reasoning%20Identifying%20Elusive%20Vowel-01%20Final.pdf
I'm not terribly convinced by the waveforms he shows, but it definitely feels plausible that the "a" gets elided when you say that phrase; without explicitly trying to enunciate the syllables, "for man" and "for a man" come out as sounding very similar when I try it.