The first and most intimate affiliations we have are the genetic
ties we share with our family and the language we speak. In the first
case, the links are pretty straightforward. Without exception, everyone
is created by two parents, who each had two parents, who themselves had
two parents, and on and on, so that behind every reader of this review,
thousands of mothers and fathers fan out and multiply in a completely
predictable way.
Linguistic inheritance, by contrast, is a story of irreducible patterns and historical contingencies… NYT Book Review.