The general direction of a great deal of sound-change is toward a simplification of the movements which make up the utterance of any given linguistic form.
- Bloomfield (1935), Pag. 370

Another change which may be regarded as a simplification occurs in the history of some stress-using languages: the quantities of stressed vowels are regulated according to the character of the following phonemes. Generally, long vowels remain long and short vowels are lengthened in "open" syllables, that is, before a single consonant that is followed by another vowel; in other positions, long vowels are shortened and short ones kept short.
- Bloomfield (1935), Pag. 384

[...] the loss of a phonemic unit may be viewed as a simplification.
- Bloomfield (1935), Pag. 385