Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch: 58 letters for a village on the Welsh island of Anglesey. It was plain Llanfairpwllgwyngyll until the 1860s, when it was given an extension to lure travellers on the new railway. The name roughly means 'St Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the church of St Tysilio of the red cave'.
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.