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The English language - so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully
unwieldy, so subtle, and now in its never-ending fullness so
undeniably magnificent - is in its essence the language of
invasion.  It was always bound to be so: geology and
oceanography saw to it that the British Isles, since long
before their populated time, were indeed almost always
islands, and the ancestors of all who ever lived there first
arrived by sea from beyond, bringing with them their customs,
their looks - and their languages.
-Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of
the Oxford English Dictionary