[…] the higher skill is won by the advanced or adult speakers, and the shape which they give to their inherited speech becomes the norm toward which new learners have to strive, attaining it when they can. In the process […] is involved an evident manifestation of the tendency to ease. Not, indeed, that the new sounds are in themselves any easier than the old; on the contrary, judged by some tests, they are harder; they are not so readily learned and reproduced by children; they are not so frequently met with in the general body of human languages. But they are easier to the practised speaker, in the rapid movements of continuous utterance, when the organs are making constant quick transition between vowel and consonant, between opener and closer positions.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.69

The character of the tendency [disposition to give up such parts of words as can be spared without detriment to the sense] is seen most clearly in the abbreviation 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 […] It is easy to perceive in all these cases the tendency to ease at work […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.50

The English is, in truth, of all the 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 of its working, 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