The French word for water lily comes from Persian 'nīlūfar', via Arabic, and has nothing Greek about it. Yet in 1935 the Académie française's dictionary swapped the old spelling 'nénufar' for 'nénuphar', with a Greek-looking 'ph'. The 1990 spelling reform proposed going back to 'nénufar', sparking an uproar. Both are accepted today: the supposed mistake was the original rule.
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.