“Hier ist noch das Foto vom Familienfest.”
This is the first line of a fictional e-mail in my workbook. The rest of the e-mail simply details who is who in the photograph.
I don’t understand the meaning or purpose of noch in the sentence. None of the definitions I found online seem to fit here. Help please!
„Hier ist noch das Foto vom Familienfest.“
In this case, noch belongs to the synonyme family including des Weiteren, zusätzlich, ergänzend, überdies, etc. In English this would be something like in addition, additionally, furthermore, moreover, etc. Perhaps the sender forgot to send the photo with the last e-mail and would like to make up for it now.
None of the definitions I found online seem to fit here.
Well, there are various sources which have a proper definition, for example,
One possible scenario is that the sender has announced before that he would send the photo, and when he actually does send it, he refers to the earlier communication by noch. Hence, in this case noch is a brief way to say as mentioned earlier.
I would interpret "noch" as an additional event late in the time-axis.
I take Inspector Columbo as an example: In the German translation, when he leaves a room and turns around to pose an additional question, he says:
Eine Frage hätte ich noch.
instead of
Ich hätte ein Frage.
which would be the right phrase in an ongoing conversation. So maybe in you example the photo is handed over at a time where the conversion is already finished?!
In this case noch most probably refers to a previous conversation not depicted there. I see three possible meanings:
If it were a "real" e-mail, there would also be the possibility that it's just a colloquial fill word with no meaning, but since it's from a workbook I doubt that
“Hier ist noch das Foto vom Familienfest.”
In this context it doesn't carry much meaning. If you only said
Hier ist das Foto vom Familienfest
this would simply have the meaning of "Here is the photo of the Family celebration".
With the noch it could mean that they were just saying goodbye to each other and he/she remembered to give the photo. In this case it would mean "Oh, here is the photo of the family celebration" or "Also, here is the photo of the family celebration".
Noch is used here as a "modal particle"
German makes frequent use of these particles to reflect mood in colloquial, often spoken, registers. They are infamously difficult to translate, as grammatical mood isn't encoded in English in this way.
Literally translated, your example could be: "Here is yet a photo from the Family Festival." However, unless you're coming from dutchy Pennsylvania where we sometimes use this particle specifically, the "yet" doesn't lend the same semantic value as it does in German.
Think of it as a means to draw attention to the fact that you're transitioning from one idea to the other, as if to say, "We have been spending a lot of time with family, and we are enjoying it! (In fact,) here is (yet) a photo from the family festival." Without the words in parentheses, the transition between those thoughts is less "smooth," sozusagen.
I'd say its another convention, something along the lines of "I attach", but a slightly more colloquial one. As you already have pointed out, it's introducing the photo that has been attached to the email.
