Literal meaning of: “Es ist noch kein Meister vom Himmel gefallen”

Question

I recently came across the expression:

Es ist noch kein Meister vom Himmel gefallen

There’s still no master [that has] fallen from the sky

I'm curious about the es ist part, which I understood as it is, but here seems to work more like es gibt.

How would you translate the literal meaning here?

Related: “es ist/sind” versus “da ist/sind” to mean there is/are – The use of an infinitive with the pronoun “es” — Em1, Aug 06 '14 at 14:59

score 31 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 23 '15 at 17:35

31

Perhaps you understand it rephrased like this:

Noch kein Meister ist vom Himmel gefallen.

While this is not the idiomatic wording, it says exactly the same. If you know some German, you'll recognize ist as a present-perfect auxiliary: ist gefallen as in has fallen.

Es ist an expletive here (German/English Wikipedia). That's basically a word that is only there for syntactic reasons and bears no meaning. As such, it's very similar to the es in es gibt.

An attempt at a literal translation of the phrase:

No master has yet fallen from the sky.

edited Apr 23 '15 at 17:35

Jan

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answered Aug 06 '14 at 11:55

elena

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The explanation of the expletive pronoun really helps, thanks. As a native English speaker I use it all the time, and yet it confused me here in German. – Martin Aug 06 '14 at 15:13
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Maybe it's nitpicking but this "es" is not exactly the same as in "es gibt". This can be seen by reversing the order. "Es gibt in Berlin Bäume." "Bäume gibt es in Berlin." vs. "Es ist jemand gefallen" vs. "Jemand ist gefallen." The "es" in the first example is an expletive as per definition of English. It takes a grammatical role (here, the subject). The one in the second does NOT have the subject-role, nor is it an object. It is really just a filler that fills slot 1. – Emanuel Aug 06 '14 at 20:01
@Emanuel I guess you're right. I've always found analysis of expletives confusing. Would you agree to call it similar? – elena Aug 07 '14 at 08:35
Definitely...... – Emanuel Aug 07 '14 at 09:16
From sky or from heaven? – user unknown Apr 24 '15 at 03:20

Tom Au · Answer 2 · 2015-12-26T16:19:15.020

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The figurative meaning is:

Masters are made, not born.

The literal meaning is,

There still aren't any masters that have fallen from the sky.

edited Dec 26 '15 at 16:19

answered Aug 07 '14 at 14:46

Tom Au

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score 6 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 30 '15 at 11:11

The German language allows a reordering of most declarative sentences with a subject in the third person (e.g. he, she, it and they) in a way to put Es in front and then the verb. The verb itself keeps its grammatical form.

Regenwolken kommen. => Es kommen Regenwolken.

As you can see, the kommen keeps the form, Regenwolken demands. This special form is used to put the focus on the verb instead of the subject or any other grammatical part that takes the first place in the sentence, as a verb has to be in the second place in German declarative sentences.

With this knowledge, it is easy to translate the sentence literally:

Es ist noch kein Meister vom Himmel gefallen.
=>reordering=> Noch ist kein Meister vom Himmel gefallen.
=>translation=> Until now, no master has fallen from the sky.

Literal meaning of: “Es ist noch kein Meister vom Himmel gefallen”

3 Answers3