The Japanese shorten long English loanwords by the simplest of expedients—simply chopping off the last half of the word. So “convenience” becomes “conveni”. That always seemed kind of crude to me, albeit cute in a way.

But now I’ve noticed a trend in English to do the same thing (instead of, or in addition to, the old acronym approach). Two recent examples are the teen-age “convo”, for “conversation”, and the geekian “distro”, for “distribution” as in a Linux distribution. And of course there’s the old stand-by “combo”, corresponding to the Japanese “kombi”.

Why is it that in English we tend to want to end these words with an “o” sound?

Any more examples out there?

Today on TV I heard the following:

That stuff was the guy who lived there before his.

This sounded very natural so it took me a second to figure out what was happening. The stuff belonged to the guy “who lived their before him“, and then to make that phrase possessive, it was easy enough to make the basic him to his transformation.