[Elsie]

So much for the Romance languages; how about the Finnish - chinese - Bantu?

[gomaaa]

I posted about this a while back.

There is a well-developed theory of language evolution. A lot of very clever people have been working on it for a very long time.

http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Linguistic_Evolution

[Doctor Stochastic]

Finnish and Hungarian share a common ancestor (and maybe Estonian or Latvian, I don't remember.)

Bantu is a group of languages sharing a common ancestor.

I haven't read much about the Chinese.

Comrie's book, "The World's Major Languages" is an older reference that's pretty good.