sen kummemmin

[Satish]

Can someone tell me what the phrase sen kummemmin means? The nearest that I got to it was a website that said it meant sen enempää kuin = any more than?? but it still does not help me with sentences such as this from google.

Talvisodan aikanahan ei huolto pelannut hevosten sen kummemmin kuin miestenkään osalta.
Emme ole käyttäneet sen kummemmin kuin muutkaan.

Thanks for the help!

[AldenG]

It's actually ei . . . sen kummemmin

(plus optional, otherwise implied) kuin _____kaan.

It would be exceptional to find it without the ei leading in, and offhand I can't dream up an example where it would work, if there is one.

It often doesn't pay to be too literal with these expressions, and the translation you give is a good one.

It's related to kumma and kummallinen, as in kumma juttu -- that's a bit weird, that's odd, that's strange. (Literally "odd affair.")

kumma odd, peculiar
kummempi more odd, more peculiar
kummemmin more oddly more peculiarly

So ei (or another person like en, emme, etc.) sen kummemmin quasi-literally means no more oddly, no more peculiarly, but getting closer to the true sense, "no more particularly" -- not to any strange or exceptional degree, etc.

[jahasjahas]

It would be exceptional to find it without the ei leading in, and offhand I can't dream up an example where it would work, if there is one.

If we're allowed to modify the phrase a bit, I'd suggest "Sen kummemmitta puheitta..." (more or less "Without further ado...")

Of course, there we have the abessive providing the necessary negativity.

[AldenG]

You clever devil, you...

[AldenG]

The nearest that I got to it was a website that said it meant sen enempää kuin = any more than?? but it still does not help me with sentences such as this from google.

Here's another closely related example the author of your cited page used in talking about the page itself:

Sivu on rakenteeltaan mahdollisimman yksinkertainen niin, että sen voi tallettaa kovalevylle jatkuvaa käyttöä varten ilman sen kummallisempia temppuja.

The page is structurally as simple as possible so that it can be saved to the hard drive for future reference ("continuing use") without...

(And here I find I can't continue piece-by-piece translation idiomatically)
...any special tricks.

I would render the whole thing as "...so that it can easily be saved to the hard drive for future reference."

There's probably an English expression that corresponds to (ei) sen kummemmin/kummempaa (kuin), but it doesn't occur to me. This expression seems to be a good candidate for just knowing the meaning without knowing the translation, which to me seems the ultimate goal of learning to read Finnish, anyway.

[Rob A.]

There's probably an English expression that corresponds to (ei) sen kummemmin/kummempaa (kuin), but it doesn't occur to me. This expression seems to be a good candidate for just knowing the meaning without knowing the translation, which to me seems the ultimate goal of learning to read Finnish, anyway.

Yes...the expression seems to be sufficiently idiomatic that its various possibilities will only be revealed gradually as one slowly acquires proficiency... It is probably sufficient initially to think that it carries the meaning of "any further".

Here are several sentences, randomly selected from the internet, to think about:

1. Kolmas: Sen kummemmin avaamatta edeltäviä tapahtumia.
="Third: "Without opening / delving any further into the preceding happenings."

2. sen kummemmin puoluepolitiikkaan puuttumatta.
="without getting any further into party politics."

3. Kuka muu ei aio siivota sen kummemmin jouluksi?
="Who else intends not to clean any further for Christmas?"

[Jukka Aho]

3. Kuka muu ei aio siivota sen kummemmin jouluksi?
="Who else intends not to clean any further for Christmas?"

Maybe rather “to no particular/special/out-of-the-norm extent”.

[Satish]

There's probably an English expression that corresponds to (ei) sen kummemmin/kummempaa (kuin), but it doesn't occur to me. This expression seems to be a good candidate for just knowing the meaning without knowing the translation, which to me seems the ultimate goal of learning to read Finnish, anyway.

With straight vocabulary becoming more familiar, I think I am entering into this kind of territory. Two steps forward, one step.... !!

[Rob A.]

There's probably an English expression that corresponds to (ei) sen kummemmin/kummempaa (kuin), but it doesn't occur to me. This expression seems to be a good candidate for just knowing the meaning without knowing the translation, which to me seems the ultimate goal of learning to read Finnish, anyway.

With straight vocabulary becoming more familiar, I think I am entering into this kind of territory. Two steps forward, one step.... !!

Yes... But I'm still kind of curious what it might mean literally...even if it has no real, everyday meaning... Maybe someone one can "humour" me...

sen kummemmin...sen appears to be genitive.."its"...and kummemmin is the instructive form of kummempi.... So literally it might be something like "by means of its ...????"....

[onkko]

sen kummemmin...sen appears to be genitive.."its"...and kummemmin is the instructive form of kummempi.... So literally it might be something like "by means of its ...????"....

Literally it is "its weirder"
Sen is from Se = it
Kummemmin is from Kumma = weird

[AldenG]

Taksi ei ehdi perille sen nopeammin kuin bussikaan.
A taxi won't get you there (arrive, reach the destination) any faster than the bus.

You have to understand ei sen kummemmin (kuin) in the context of this general construct. And the construct is a whole family of expressions that are not the sum of their parts. (Many, many of those in Finnish, as we have touched on before.) There is no actual "se" in any practical sense. If you want to understand "how" or "why" it works, I guess you have to think of sen as "any." Then the equation balances, so to speak. In fact, the sen here (I'm only guessing now) may have evolved as a syllable to stand in for "any" in the English family of expressions and the counterpart of "any" in other languages' version of that family.

You could say taksi ei ehdi perille yhtään nopeammin kuin bussi(kaan), but that's far more emphatic, like saying the taxi won't get you there one second sooner than a bus. It's more emphatic than the English and it's more emphatic than the Finnish using sen nopeammin.

[AldenG]

sen kummemmin...sen appears to be genitive.."its"...and kummemmin is the instructive form of kummempi

I don't know if that's technically correct -- it sounds like it could be.

But when you put -in on a comparative adjective, it is exactly like "ly" in English.

hidas slow
hitaampi slower
hitaammin more slowLY

I can think of no other way to translate the -in in such a context. I just think of it as an adverbial ending, a "sti" you can use for comparatives.

Now samoin sanoin would mean "using the same words, in the same words," which is clearly the case you were thinking of. But even in these situations, to me the -in still "feels" quite adverbial in spirit, as though the case were a convenient method for attaching that adverbial meaning to a noun or adjective. Whether hitaammin and sanoin are technically instances of the same grammatical entity I'll have to leave for grammar mavens.

Bottom line: the kummemmin in sen kummemmin is definitely "more oddly, more strangely, more exceptionally." If something needs to bend in the mind (in Finnish) from its usual meaning to make everything fit together, it is one of the other words -- in this case most readily the sen.

[skandagupta]

nothing stranger than that = nothing out of way

[AldenG]

Rob, another way to understand the sen is just to ignore it.

I asked my wife how she would explain why it is there or how it came to be there, and she said "it's just one of those weed words" that contributes nothing -- or at most a bit of color or rhythm -- compared to the same sentence without it. If it contributes nuance, the difference between different individuals' concept of the nuance may be bigger than the difference between meaning A and meaning B. In other words, the supposed nuance may be nothing more than sampling noise.

[Satish]

Rob, another way to understand the sen is just to ignore it.

I asked my wife how she would explain why it is there or how it came to be there, and she said "it's just one of those weed words" that contributes nothing -- or at most a bit of color or rhythm -- compared to the same sentence without it. If it contributes nuance, the difference between different individuals' concept of the nuance may be bigger than the difference between meaning A and meaning B. In other words, the supposed nuance may be nothing more than sampling noise.

Hei, no need to ignore it at all. Here is an extract from my English to Finnish dictionary under the entry for "any"

...adv (us komp edellä jolloin se voi jäädä myös kääntämättä; esim I won't stay ~ longer) yhtään, sen (he won't be ~ happier);.....

So, I have just learnt a neat little specialised form of any!!! Thanks for persisting with this guys...

PS. The dictionary I used is Englanti-Suomi Suursanakirja, Raija Hurme, Maritta Pesonen, Olli Syväoja, Valitut Palat, WSOY 1995.