For the film 'Star Trek III' (1984), linguist Marc Okrand developed Klingon and gave it object-verb-subject order: 'bread eats man' for 'the man eats bread'. A deliberately alien choice, as this order is among the rarest in human languages. Klingon has since gained a dictionary, devoted speakers, a translation of Hamlet and, since 2018, even a course on the Duolingo app.
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.