After the Norman Conquest of 1066, French became the language of England's elite. English kept its Germanic words for live animals, 'cow', 'pig' and 'sheep', but took French words for their meat: 'beef' from 'bœuf', 'pork' from 'porc', 'mutton' from 'mouton'. The social explanation, popularised by Walter Scott's 'Ivanhoe' in 1819, is a little simplified, but the split is real.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.