Truncation is the shortening of a word or stem by removing part of it and leaving the rest intact. Simple cases from English include (personal names) Michael > Mike [maik], Christopher > Chris, Peter > Pete, Ronald > Ron, etc. There is some variation in the usage of the term; Joseph (2001:352), for instance, uses it to describe the reduction of phrases like ‘Watergate affair’ to simply ‘Watergate’. See Zwicky and P…