Actually, that’s more or less how the phonology of languages change internally over long periods of time [1]: sets of phonemes merge, split, appear, and disappear. The particular forces driving these changes are varied and complicated, but particular sounds that have adjacencies on various axes twist and enjoin and diverge, dancing about according to constraints that produce surface complexity like in a multibody system. Something about the way I’ve always envisioned phonological change makes me think of Voronoi diagrams [2].
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_change
[2] http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/voronoi.html