On 10 March 1906, a firedamp explosion devastated the Courrières mine in northern France, killing more than 1,000 miners: Europe's worst mining disaster. On 30 March, thirteen survivors emerged after twenty days underground. The national press picked up the word the miners used on site, 'rescapés', a regional form of standard 'réchappés' that the Trésor de la langue française traces to Walloon. The regional word has been part of everyday French ever since.
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.