If you’re referring to sort of convergent evolution generally, there are lots of examples of this. There’s an entire school of linguistic thought focused on typology and functionalist approaches to linguistics that look at just this sort of thing.
Just to take one fascinating example, take ergative alignment.
This’ll take a moment to get into, but I think you may find it a helpful comparison, and interesting,
I hope.
In English and many commonly known languages, you have “nominative-accusative alignment.” This means that the subject of intransitive verbs like “sleep” patterns with the subject of transitive verbs like “kill.” So we say “I killed him” and we also say “I sleep,” with “I” in the subject (nominative) case. We don’t say “me sleep” and put the first person pronoun in the object (accusative) case.
In Basque, Inuktitut (“Eskimo”), and lots of other languages around the world, they have “ergative-absolutive alignment.” This means that the subject of intransitive verbs like “sleep” patterns with the object of transitive verbs like “kill.” The transitive subject is in the “ergative” case and the others are in the “absolutive” case. So if English were ergative-absolutive, we would say “he killed me” and “me sleep,” with the transitive object and intransitive subject sharing a single grammatical case that differs from that of the transitive subject.
What’s interesting is that this is a pattern found all around the world but in completely unrelated languages. Take this map from the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (a fun rabbit hole for the interested reader, btw):
Ergative case marking is all the red dots. Languages with ergative case marking are found in the Pacific Northwest & Arctic, Amazonia, Australia & PNG, the Caucasus, the Pays Basque, the Mayan languages (such as where @Christy and her husband work) and a smattering of other places. Needless to say, this isn’t a genetic relationship!
The actual ergative case marker itself will vary from language to language. In Inuktitut (Eskimo) it’s -up, -k, or -it, where in Lezgian (in the Caucasus) it’s -di, -a, or -e. What is similar is the grammatical pattern of ergativity. It pops up over and over again, much like echolocation, powered flight, or bioluminescence, because there are functional pressures that support it. It’s a system that works well for certain communicative purposes, for instance (acc. to Du Bois 1987, at least) tracking old versus new information in narratives (“discourse”).
Is this the kind of example you were looking for?
The kind of genetic drift we’re discussing in linguistics is not a conscious process. Borrowing words is conscious. Sound change isn’t.
