HOW WORDS MOVE.
HOW MEANINGS MUTATE.

Spelling stabilized around love while the short stressed vowel continued into modern English.

Inherited noun and verb expanded into preference, devotion, and address.

Final unstressed -u was lost; Old English intervocalic ⟨f⟩ had a voiced realization [v].

Religious, familial, erotic, and social senses continued.

English adapted the learned French form and later aligned spelling with the classical model.

The technical term broadened into the modern historical discipline.

Old French transmitted the learned Latin form.

Scholarly explanation of a word’s origin continued.

Latin borrowed Greek ἐτυμολογία.

A Greek technical concept entered Latin grammatical tradition.

The compound joins ἔτυμος “true, real” and -λογία “account, study.”

A word’s “true sense” becomes an object of analysis.

French stress and vowels were adapted into English.

The word narrowed toward fixed regular compensation.

A regular Romance continuation of Latin salārium.

Official payment became general compensation.

salārium is morphologically related to salārius “pertaining to salt,” from sāl.

The precise bridge from salt to official compensation is not preserved.

English borrowed the learned French adjective with later vowel development.

Material purity shifted toward honesty of feeling and expression.

French borrowed Latin sincerus.

Physical intactness and moral genuineness continued together.

The spelling clue became standard for the figurative sense while clew remained literal.

A guiding thread became a fact that guides reasoning.

Old English vowel sequence and inflection simplified in Middle English.

A concrete ball or wound thread was retained.

English adapted the French form, including stress and final syllable.

The inherited calamity sense became the general modern category of disaster.

Italian disastro combines the negative prefix dis- with astro “star.”

An unfavorable star or astral influence became calamity.

Italian astro continues Latin astrum through regular Romance development.

The celestial-body meaning remains stable.

English borrowed the learned Latin office term with regular adaptation of ending and stress.

An office-seeker remained an office-seeker, later broadening to any person under selection.

Latin candidātus is built from candidus and identifies the person clothed in shining white.

The white-clad Roman office-seeker became the lexical category for a person seeking office.

candidus belongs to the candēre family of shining and whiteness.

Physical brightness and whiteness extended to clarity and unblemished quality.

quarantena is transparently built on the Italian numeral quaranta.

Forty becomes a conventional duration, then names the isolation itself.

Italian quaranta regularly continues Latin quadrāgintā.

The numeral meaning remains forty.

Latin quadrāgintā is the inherited decimal formation based on four.

Four is multiplied into the decade numeral forty.

Middle English final consonant and vowel pattern stabilized as modern logic with later pronunciation change.

The technical discipline broadened into everyday “reasoning” and, later, computational circuitry.

Middle English adapted the Anglo-French form and spelling.

The scholastic discipline retained its core reference.