[…] as regards change of form, we have to recognize, as the grand tendency underlying all the innumerable and apparently heterogeneous facts which it embraces, the disposition, or at least the readiness, to give up such parts of words as can be spared without detriment to the sense, and so to work over what is left that it shall be more manageable by its users, more agreeable to their habits and preferences […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.49-50

In this fundamental fact, that the uttered sign was a conventional one, bound to the conception signified by it only by a tie of mental association, lay the possibility both of its change of meaning and of its change of form. If the tie were a natural, an internal and necessary one, it would seem to follow that any change in either would have to be accompanied by a change in the other. But in the case taken [‘bishop’ from ‘episkopos’], while the idea has expanded into greatness, the word has been shrinking in its proportions, and is nowhere more than a fragment of its former self.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.48

In treating separately […] the subjects of change of form and change of meaning in words, we are not parting two necessarily connected and mutually dependent processes; but only recognizing a natural independence. A word may change its form, to any extent, without change of meaning; it may take on an entirely new meaning without change of form. As a matter of fact, the words are few or none which have not done both […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.49

Our tracing of the etymology of a word is the following up of a series of acts of name-making, consisting chiefly in the new applications of old material- with the accompanying, but independent, change of form.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.143