French 'poids', weight, comes from Latin 'pensum', something weighed, and was spelled 'pois' or 'peis' in the Middle Ages. From the 15th century, scholars wrongly assumed it came from Latin 'pondus', weight, and added a d to make it look learned. The error stuck. French 'legs', a bequest, suffered the same fate: linked to 'léguer', to bequeath, though it really comes from 'laisser', to leave.
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.