"Der Kopf ist von oben nicht sichtbar."
Translation:The head is not visible from above.
29 Comments
Think about a shooting game when you have to kill a Nazi and you are looking down through a hole on the roof. You just can't shoot him in the head because "Der Kopf ist von oben nicht sichtbar." :))
How would one say: "The head is not visible from the top"? (since that's what I thought the correct translation would be)
This is clearly from the same conversation as "thus the neck is barely visible"
Hm, I wasn't aware of that. Well, merriam-webster.com doesn't recognize "seeable" as a word. Perhaps other dictionaries do because people use it as one?
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The word 'seeable' is there now! https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/seeable
From the comments on these adverb questions, I may be the only one completely lost in apparent ambiguity (not specifically this statement).
Is the 'ch' in 'sichtbar' pronounced as a guttural 'ch' or a 'sh' sound? I was expecting the former but all of the audio I can find of it sounds like it's a 'sh' sound.
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<ch> after a back vowel is pronounced [χ] for example "acht" http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/acht#German and after a front vowel it is pronounced [ç] as in "echt" http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/echt#German both fricatives are voiceless.
I love when other people understand linguistics, the IPA, fricatives, etc! Linguistics is amazing.
You wouldn't say something was "not visible from up" in English unless you are referring to a specific place, e.g. "from up there" or "from up on the hill" or "from up the stairs".
I can't give you a technical explanation, but my understanding is that since "von oben" is acting as sort of an adjective here -- imagine the head is "not completely visible" instead; "completely" serves the same general function as "from above" -- it should go before the idea is describing, which in this case is "nicht sichtbar", to make a proper German sentence.
