True, it boggles my mind also! But for reasons I'm struggling to explain, it doesn't strike me as weird or surprising that, for example, American English and Na

True, it boggles my mind also! But for reasons I'm struggling to explain, it doesn't strike me as weird or surprising that, for example, American English and Navajo are completely unrelated despite being spoken in close physical proximity to each other. I guess it is because the settlement and colonization of the Southwestern US is in much more recent memory, whereas we sort of think of Hindi and its ancestors like Sanskrit as having been spoken in India since time immemorial. FWIW, it should be pointed out, to be strictly correct, that we really have no idea whether the various language families are related to each other and descended from some "proto-World" language. So instead of saying "X and Y are completely unrelated", it's probably more accurate to say "there is no known evidence that X and Y are related".