Breakdown of Ymmärsimme helleaallon vasta, kun se oli kuumempi kuin mikään muu.
olla
to be
se
it / he / she (of a person) / that
ymmärtää
to understand
kuuma
hot
Questions & Answers about Ymmärsimme helleaallon vasta, kun se oli kuumempi kuin mikään muu.
Why is mikään used here instead of mikä, since the sentence isn't negative?
While mikään usually means 'anything' in negative sentences, it is also used in affirmative sentences for comparisons (as well as conditional clauses and indirect questions) to mean 'anything at all'. Here, kuumempi kuin mikään muu means 'hotter than anything else'. If you used mikä, it would incorrectly sound like a question word.
The translation says 'only understood', so why does the Finnish use vasta instead of vain?
Vasta means 'only' in the sense of time, meaning 'not until' or 'only just now'. You use it when something happens later than expected. If you used vain, it would mean 'we merely understood the heatwave', implying you just understood it but didn't take any action.
Why is helleaallon in the genitive case rather than the partitive?
The verb ymmärtää can take either a partitive or a total object (which looks like the genitive here). Because grasping the severity of the heatwave is treated as a completed realization in this context, it takes the total object helleaallon. If the understanding was an ongoing, incomplete process, you would use the partitive helleaaltoa.
Does muu always follow mikään when we want to say 'anything else'?