Adopted in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is available in more than 500 languages, from Abkhaz to Zulu, earning it the Guinness record for most translated document. The UN Human Rights Office keeps adding more. Its Article 1 is often used as a sample text to compare languages side by side.
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.