The Olympic Charter is explicit: French and English are the two official languages of the International Olympic Committee. And if the two versions of a document ever differ, the French text prevails unless stated otherwise. At ceremonies, announcements are traditionally made in French, English and the host country's language. The IOC was founded in Paris in 1894, at the initiative of Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin.
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.