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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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In shanks's case the only ones that could reasonably qualify as foreign are his main language and the one he calls his mother tongue. Or either that or I've got his provenance all wangary in my mind, one.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I couldn't get the sound file link to work. If you scroll down and click on Apollo 11 transcript, you can read about it. Go about a third of the way down the page, to 109:24:48.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
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I think the fact that the "a" is sandwiched between the specific consonant sounds of the final "r" and beginning "m" causes it to dissolve. If one or both of the consonants were different the "a" wouldn't be so apt to disappear. For instance, "One small step at a man." Following the "t" of "at" the "a" pretty much has to be there, no matter how you try to make it go away. Try it and see.
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journeyman
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journeyman
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If he had been speaking casually, the schwa could well have merged with the continuant on either side of it. But he was speaking quite slowly, as befit the occasion, as I recall. I heard the recording several years ago, and having by then heard about this, I confirmed the "a" was unmistakably missing: I didn't hear it as doubtful.
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old hand
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old hand
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Hi
Malayalam is from Kerala, which is part of India, so it doesn't really qualify as foreign.
French (though I know next to nothing of it), does serve as a 'foreign' language.
As for me, with more than one tongue trailing behind my English, I'm likely to call them auxilliary (or perhaps ancillary) languages. What do you think?
cheer
the sunshine warrior
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member
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Well found. After "that's" there are four evenly-spaced and distinctly-stressed syllables: "one, small, step, man", and "for" less prominent but equally distinct. No way there's anything else in there. No slurring, no swallowing. The syllabic peaks just don't allow for any "a", however unstressed.
Beyond that... long, long pause, and interference, and uncertainty. Maybe he realized he'd screwed it up, maybe he didn't notice. Very long hesitation: hard to say why. The latter parts have crackle. But there's no crackle in the first half.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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check Fald's Snopes link. Armstrong missed the word, and knows it. it was scripted and he got a bit excited(wonder why?)... 
formerly known as etaoin...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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We were told that that second and foreign languages are languages one learnt after puberty: a second language is a language used in the country where one learnt it and uses it, and a foreign language is a language not so used.
So for me, Indonesian is a second language because I live in Indonesia, and French is a foreign language because it's not spoken here.
Bingley
Bingley
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addict
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addict
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The pesky "a": Is there a linguistic term for this phenomenon?
Perhaps the term you are looking for [to explain the missing "a"] is "poetic licence".
Without the "a", there are 3 beats in the 1st part of the quote, "One small step for a'man", to match the 3 beats in the last part ["one giant leap for mankind"].
The "a" is the only word sound which is expendable.
In this case, tempo trumps linguistic precision.
We all know what the sentence means even if, as you point out, it doesn't exactly say what we know it means.
Everyone who witnessed the event knew this "first small step" was a milestone of history. We needed the words celebrating the event to sound like they had been spoken for all the ages.
Only poetry can accomplish this.
One can write poetry without rhyme, but not without rhythm.
If there had been 4 beats in the 2nd part of the sentence, the "a" would have been stressed, not muted.
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