La masacre de Nunca Jamás by Axael Velasquez

There could of course be other reasons for the frequency disparity than that of emphasis. If you click on the graph, it should take you to the original. If the scholarly Chilean site is correct about jamás being more emphatic than nunca, then it would make sense for jamás to occur with less frequency than nunca, since emphasis is less common than not emphasizing something.Īnd in fact, this is precisely what we find in Google Books: nunca is certainly the more common of the two, occurring about four times as often as jamás does in Google Books’ Spanish corpus: See Llorens 1929, “La negación en español antiguo con referencias a otros idiomas” in Revista de Filología Española for more on this. However, if you read medieval Spanish, be prepared to find jamás sometimes used in the sense of siempre instead of as nunca. However, over the years it eventually changed its meaning to the very opposite of that - to meaning nunca - which is the prevailing situation in our day. The actual history of the word jamás is interesting, deriving from a Latin expression literally meaning ya más. That is, jamás is an emphatic version of nunca - now. In their entry on the historical origin of jamás, this Chilean website on Etymologies succinctly summarizes the principal difference this way: So while in many instances there is little to no difference between them, sometimes there can be. It is easy to find nunca and jamás occurring in free variation within the same paragraph, even within the same sentence, with absolutely no difference in meaning intended.

La masacre de Nunca Jamás by Axael Velasquez