It [change of form] is another manifestation of the same tendency which leads men to use abbreviations in writing, to take a short cut instead of going around by the usual road, and other like things- in which there is no harm, unless more is lost than gained by the would-be economy: then, indeed, it becomes rather laziness than economy […] The character of the tendency is seen most clearly in the abbreviations of words, obviously nothing else is needed to explain the gradual reduction of form which has ever been going on in the constituents of every language.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.50

Phonetic abbreviation has made the difference between godly, […]- a formed word, containing a radical and a formative element- and godlike, a mere compound.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.52

The auxiliary processes of oblivion and attenuation and transfer of meaning, and of disguise and abbreviation of form […] are essential parts of the making of forms; for so long as the independent word, in its individual shape and meaning, is plainly recognized in the combination, so long does this remain a compound rather than a form […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.124

The English is […] of all languages of its kindred, the one which most remarkably illustrates that mode of linguistic change consisting in the loss of formal grammatical distinction by synthetic means; there is no other known tongue which, from having been so rich in them, has become so poor; none which has so nearly stripped its root-syllables of the apparatus of suffixes with which they were formerly clothed, and left them monosyllabic. All this has come about mainly through the instrumentality of the tendency to ease and abbreviation, a tendency which in this department, especially, makes truly for decay; the conservative force, the strictness of traditional transmission, has not been sufficient to resist its inroads.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.105

The tendency to abbreviation for ease, for economy of effort in expression, is a universal and a blind one; destruction lies everywhere in its path. The same process which by a disguising fusion and integration of elements once independent, makes a word or form, goes straight on to its contraction and mutilation- and in early language as certainly, though not necessarily so rapidly, as in later.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.106