IBM France wanted a name for its new electronic machine, the IBM 650, without borrowing the English 'computer'. On 16 April 1955, Latin scholar Jacques Perret, a professor at the Sorbonne, suggested 'ordinateur', an old word describing God as the one who puts the world in order. He also offered the feminine 'ordinatrice'. IBM chose 'ordinateur', and the whole French language followed.
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.