[…] 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 […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.49

[…] the tendency to economy, in the very midst of its destructive action, is at the same time constructive. It begins with producing those very forms which it is afterward to mutilate and wear out.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.53

All this [loss of formal grammatical distinction] 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

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 […] 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