People and small words

Ma and mai sit a few entries apart here and look like strangers. They are the same Latin word. Magis was the comparative adverb built on magnus, and it meant more — the family English knows through « magnitude », « magnify » and « major ». One road out of it runs through the idea of more than that, and ends in contradiction: Italian ma, French mais, Spanish and Portuguese mas, all of them the ordinary word for « but ». The other road runs through negative sentences, where magis stood so often that it absorbed the negation and kept it. That is why mai looks like a negative word and is not one: it still needs non in front of the verb, non ci vado mai, and in a question it goes back to meaning « ever » — sei mai stato a Roma? asks whether you have ever been to Rome. Learn the two together, and notice which word did not join them: più comes from plus, and it took over the plain comparison that ma and mai had both walked away from.