The legend refuses to die: the Nova supposedly sold poorly in Latin America because 'no va' means 'doesn't go' in Spanish. In fact, it sold well in Mexico and in Venezuela, where it even beat expectations. To a Spanish speaker, 'nova' no more sounds like 'no va' than 'notable' sounds like 'no table' to an English speaker. Mexico's state oil company Pemex even sold a petrol called Nova.
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.