When royal assent is given by ceremony in the UK, the Clerk of the Parliaments announces it in Norman French: 'Le Roy le veult', the King wills it, or 'La Reyne le veult' under a queen. A refusal would be 'Le Roy s'avisera', the King will consider it, a formula unused since the early 18th century. It's a legacy of the 1066 Norman Conquest, after which French long served as the language of English power and law.
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.