On 2008-12-04 11:38, Pavel A. da Mek wrote:
> I think that an important difference between shortening and lenghtening
> is that single phonememes are dropped, whereas whole morphemes or even
> whole words are added.
Yes. Incrementation is a morphological process while "erosion" is
phonetic. What actually gets lost, however, is not so much individual
segments as linguistically relevant information encoded in them.
Assimilation, mergers and segmental losses all have the same
"scrambling" effect, resulting in the reduction of the phonetic
substance and its information content, _and_ the obscuration of the
morphological structure of words. <young> differs from
*[[[h2ju][h3n]]k^รณ]s not only in being composed of three phonemes rather
than eight, but also in being morphologically simplex.
Piotr