In 1535, on his second voyage, Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence guided by two young Iroquoian men. They pointed him towards 'kanata', meaning the village of Stadacona, where Quebec City stands today. Lacking another name, Cartier then used 'Canada' for the whole area ruled by Chief Donnacona. The name gradually spread until it covered the world's second-largest country.
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.