Traditional Mongolian script, adopted in the 13th century under Genghis Khan, runs in vertical columns read from top to bottom and from left to right. Surprisingly, it is a distant descendant of the Aramaic alphabet, by way of the Sogdian and Uyghur scripts, simply rotated a quarter turn. Replaced by Cyrillic in Mongolia in the 1940s, it survived in China's Inner Mongolia and is now returning to Mongolian official documents.
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.