The legend dies hard: in 1814, Russian soldiers occupying Paris supposedly shouted 'bystro!', 'quickly!', at café owners. But the word only appears in print in the 1880s, some seventy years later, a gap that is hard to explain. Leading French dictionaries call its origin obscure; one hypothesis links it to the Poitou dialect word 'bistraud', a little servant, which may first have meant a wine merchant's helper.
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.