Hacker News Reader

Comment by sokrates | Hacker News Reader

As a non-native English speaker, I find the omissions of "the" very prominent and interesting in SpaceX speech. "shortly before first stage shutdown", "resulting in loss of mission", "139 seconds into flight", "some period of time following separation", "data to determine root cause" -- is this a general theme in engineering or journalism? I wonder what linguists have to say about this.

View on HN

In these cases the phrases are being used as proper nouns for preexisting events on the timeline. For example, I wouldn't say that I went for a walk "five minutes before the noon," I'd say "five minutes before noon." They're speaking in a jargon that treats these events the same way that you or I would talk about Monday or midnight and which also gives them precise meanings. If the main engine shut down on its own at an unexpected time then you could say "shortly before the main engine shut down." This lets you say things like "The main engine lost power 30 seconds before main engine shutdown" and be only slightly confusing rather than nonsensical.

It's standard in military debriefings (aerospace at least), especially for flight test debriefings. The flight test pilots I've worked with, mostly former U.S. Navy test pilots, all spoke like this during their debriefings and wrote in the same way for their flight logs, report-outs, etc.

Not a linguist but a writer here who loves language.

I'm seeing a lot of folks dropping articles. It's also becoming quite common to eliminate pronouns at the beginning of sentences, i.e., instead of "I went down to the store" you write "Went to the store"

I use this purposefully to jar the reader. I have no idea what the underlying linguistic reasons are.

Implied pronouns, perhaps a trend from Facebook usage? On Facebook and Twitter you have an implied "I" that makes saying you did something redundant. This could transfer over to other formats of conversation.

Other languages are a bit ahead of English in that regard, but their conjugations make it clear who the subject is.

> Not a linguist but a writer here who loves language.

You're probably demonstrating this on purpose: your very first sentence is itself an example of dropping a pronoun + verb.

This is a common trend in scientific writing. [1]

It's considered standard to write in formal, passive, third-person tone. [2]

During undergrad, I was constantly drilled to make my writings as concise as possible.

[1] http://www2.aje.com/en/education/other-resources/articles/ed... [2] http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/passive-voice/

"First stage shutdown". "Loss of mission". "Flight". I'm not sure what the term for it is, but these seem to refer to generalized phases/states of flight that the mission can be in. The use of "the" would refer to specific instances of the noun that the speaker has reason to believe the listener would know about. [1]

They almost feel like "uncountable" nouns, but I'm not sure. "Flight" can be countable, but as a generalized state/phase, I think it wouldn't be. It doesn't sound strange to me (a native speaker).

It would not be wrong to use "the" for many/all of these cases, but it would have changed the meaning, somewhat.

[1] http://www.edufind.com/english-grammar/definite-article/

It's how engineers talk in this context.

Focus on the problem, not the people.

I see it like I see git commit messages. You need to convey as much information as possible in as few words as possible. Dropping articles that don't add anything to the context is a way to keep it sweet, short and punchy I guess.

Indicative of shared Russian heritage of spaceflight? ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com