Gall which is foreigner in some Celtic languages originally meant someone from Gaul. As for Galla, it seems to have been used to refer to the Oromo people (who also speak a Cushitic language) in Ethiopia by their neighbors. The origin seems unclear. I would say coincidence or inaccurate
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@AMWolfe might know; not sure if he has had a chance to get on the Discourse lately. I was just reflecting on language convergent evolution–Hausa is a Chadic language where the word for “meat” is “nama,” but the Shona (which is not really related, apparently, as a Bantu language) is “nyama.” My brother in law grew up with Shona in Zimbabwe, whereas I was in Niger. It would be interesting to read. However, convergent evolution in languages is certainly an interesting analogy for biologic evolution, though not from the same mechanisms, of course. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Map_of_African_language_families.svg/300px-Map_of_African_language_families.svg.png
I’m not sure exactly how the analogy works with language since one arbitrary sign is not more functional than another arbitrary sign, so there is no pressure to converge on a certain one. However, with languages you do have borrowing of words which then change over time.
For example here in Mexico, many of the indigenous languages, even ones from different language families have similar words for cat, something along the lines of mish. This intrigued researchers and they found out that when the domestic cat was introduced to Mexico by Spaniards five hundred years ago, it was typical to call a cat to eat by saying some variation of, “mish, mish, mish.” Kind of like, “Here kitty, kitty, kitty.” So, it’s not that all the languages convergently evolved their words for cat, they just have a common source outside their language family.
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Someday when you write a book, @Christy, this story will be in it. 
Really interesting, thanks!
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Interesting! But the “muss, muss” of Hausa for a cat–would be a false cognate–I think?
Hausa does have about 1/4 Arabic influenced words, from what I heard, so maybe Shona could have that via the Arab traders from the East. Who knows. Thanks for that!
Ever since I really began to think for myself this is the view that seemed most sensible to me. In terms of Faith in God, He is actually pleased with our doubts. It shows we are giving real thought to the matter. What is displeasing to Him is indifference, for then we must have placed other (material) things at a higher priority.
Al Leo
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The Babel collapse dating biblically to the 3rd millennium BC coincides with the collapses of the pan-Mesopotamian Uruk culture and the Egyptian Old Kingdom into the 1st intermediate period c.2200 BC, possibly due to a climate catastrophe
Afterwards, in the 2nd millennium BC, amidst political fragmentation, Semitic speakers and Hebrew Apiru SA.GAZ migrated en masse into the fertile crescent, possibly one man amongst them being the Hebrew named Abraham, the biblical patriarch
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Hi, Glenn. Hope you’re doing well. I ran across an interesting paper that pertains to Ruhlen’s work. In 2001, he helped found “The Evolution of Human Languages” project at the Santa Fe Institute. Here is the “state of the project” as of 2014: http://ehl.santafe.edu/EhlforWeb.pdf
To save time, here’s the pertinent part:
EHL research is very explicitly NOT targeted at trying to reconstruct or even prove the historic
reality of «the language of Adam and Eve», i. e. a single modern-type language that would be
the common ancestor of all of the world’s linguistic diversity. This refusal is based on two
considerations:
- (a) there is no reason why «X = the single common ancestor of all known world languages» should necessarily be the equivalent of «Y = the first modern-type language in the world», since it is perfectly plausible that Y, whenever it was actually spoken, had other descendants, in addition to X, all of which had disappeared without a trace;
- (b) even if X = Y, the chronological distance between the world’s deepest linguistic groupings can easily be too deep for historical linguistics to be able to do anything with it. For instance: supposing that 1) most of the world’s languages are traced back to a «Globalese», spoken 20,000 years ago, 2) except for «Khoisan» languages, traced back to a «Proto-Khoisan», spoken 15,000 years ago, 3) «Adamese», the common ancestor of «Globalese» and «Proto-Khoisan» was spoken 40,000 years ago — all of which is quite possible in theory — there is most likely no way one could arrive at any definitive conclusions about «Adamese» whatsoever: the data would be too scarce and the chronological distance too great to distinguish any useful information from pure noise.
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Adamese, that is an interesting concept. Since Adam had no teacher but God, that would have to be the language of God.
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It has been many months since my last post here. Greetings to all my friends here!
I’m not a historical linguist, but I’ve studied historical linguistics as a Harvard undergrad and then later at the graduate level. The esteemed Cal Watkins was one of my BA thesis readers.
No professional linguist takes seriously the notion that Proto-World can be reconstructed in any meaningful way. The time depth is too great. Language has a certain rate of change that makes it impossible to engage in reconstruction beyond 10,000 years or so. In this way, it’s sort of like the surface of the earth, whose history cannot be reconstructed past a certain point, because tectonic plates are subducted under other plates and vanish forever into the mantle.
Furthermore, there are rules around how to reconstruct proto-languages, and those rules require volumes of data that are not even available for most of these languages, as well as years of efforts at low-level reconstruction that have not even been attempted.
For instance, conveniently you start your examples with Nilo-Saharan (Fur, Maba, etc.), which happens to be the one language family that I have published language description in. Nilo-Saharan is woefully underdocumented. I have published an article about Beria (a.k.a. Zaghawa), but there is no published Beria dictionary, and nobody has even attempted the barest of reconstructions of Proto-Saharan (the smallest group of which Beria is a part). Yet you have massive works like Ehret 2001 that pretend to reconstruct a proto-language from the entire sprawling Nilo-Saharan “phylum,” of which the Saharan cluster is alleged to be one small part.
It’s as if all you had was a toe-bone of a hyrax, the skull of a kangaroo, and a shrew vertebra, and you tried to reconstruct from them the earliest mammal.
To your point about Greenberg,
Greenberg was not proven correct. Nilo-Saharan in particular is merely a hypothesis at this point, in my opinion.
The only good news for concordists is that because we linguists are agnostic about connections among language families in deep time, there will never be the sort of Babel-based anti-theist screeds that we see about Adam’s existence. I mean, linguists like me who enjoy this discussion will be forever starved for attention on these boards, but it’s really better for our productivity!
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I’m not so sure about that. I count what I’ve learned from your fellow linguist @Christy as every bit as important to me as any discussion of the science though I value that too. I doubt if I’m the only one. If only for an interested minority, please do jump in whenever yours specialty bears on a discussion.
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Greetings, Andrew! Good to hear your voice! Regarding Babel, if we consider that early Genesis centers on Israel and the immediate surrounding peoples,perhaps that would strengthen a historical basis for the event, though the text leaves a little room to argue that the people were scattered first, then the languages changed, which goes along with the usual course of events.
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Is that true?
Is there a reason anything in the Bible shouldn’t be questioned? And what does that “look like”?
Good to “see” you again, Andrew! 
Thanks for that insight – the comparison with plate tectonics is a great visual.
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As I’ve said before, I take the Babel story seriously (and see it as good evidence for God), but I think a better historical case can be made for a Babel event in the Uruk/Jemdet Nasr period of Mesopotamia