Word
Onko tämä ennätysmäinen talvi pahempi kuin kukaan muistaa?
Meaning
Is this record-breaking winter worse than anyone remembers?
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Onko tämä ennätysmäinen talvi pahempi kuin kukaan muistaa?
tämä
this
olla
to be
muistaa
to remember
talvi
winter
Questions & Answers about Onko tämä ennätysmäinen talvi pahempi kuin kukaan muistaa?
Why does this sentence use kukaan (usually "no one") instead of joku to mean "anyone"?
Even though this sentence is affirmative, it contains a comparison using kuin (than). In Finnish, negative polarity words like kukaan and mikään are used in comparisons, conditional clauses, and indirect questions to mean "anyone" or "anything". So kuin kukaan muistaa means "than anyone remembers". If you used joku here, it would sound like you meant "than a specific someone remembers".
How does the word ennätysmäinen break down?
It is built from the noun ennätys (a record, as in sports or weather) and the suffix -mäinen. The -mäinen suffix translates roughly to "-like" or "-esque" and turns a noun into an adjective. In this context, "record-like" naturally translates to "record-breaking".
Why is there no object pronoun after muistaa? In English we might say "than anyone remembers it."
In Finnish comparative clauses, it is very common to leave out the object pronoun (which would be sen here) when it refers back to the main subject of the sentence (tämä talvi). You could technically say kuin kukaan sitä/sen muistaa, but omitting the pronoun sounds much more natural and idiomatic.
Why use pahempi for "worse" here instead of huonompi?