According to the Wycliffe Global Alliance, the complete Bible is available in over 700 languages, the New Testament in more than 1,600, and at least portions in over 3,000. These projects often produced the very first grammars and alphabets for languages that had never been written, a linguistic legacy that reaches beyond religion.
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.