Arabic qahwa became kahve in Ottoman Turkish, then caffè in Italian thanks to Venetian merchants, before reaching English in the late 16th century. The same word gave French café, German Kaffee and Russian kofe. Follow the word and you are literally following the trade route of the bean.
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.