An ordinary Japanese sentence combines kanji, characters borrowed from Chinese for word roots; hiragana, a rounded syllabary for grammatical endings and small words; and katakana, an angular one used mostly for foreign words such as 'terebi' (television). Latin letters, called rōmaji, sometimes join in too. The official list of everyday kanji contains 2,136 characters, and each syllabary has 46 basic signs.
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.