According to a 1973 study of some 80,000 words from an Oxford dictionary, about 28% of English vocabulary comes from French, roughly as much from Latin, and only a quarter from Germanic languages. Blame the Norman Conquest of 1066: for nearly three centuries, the English court, law and administration ran in French. Yet the most common words, such as the, and, is and have, are still Germanic.
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.