Jacques de La Palice, Marshal of France, died heroically at the Battle of Pavia in 1525. His soldiers reportedly sang that if he were not dead, 'il ferait encore envie', he would still be envied. According to the usual explanation, a misreading, helped by the likeness between the long s and f, turned it into 'il serait encore en vie', he would still be alive. French now calls a statement of the obvious a 'lapalissade'.
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.