'Tabarnak', 'câlice', 'ostie', 'ciboire', 'sacrament': Quebec's swear words, known as 'sacres', are twisted names of Catholic objects and rites, such as the tabernacle, the chalice or the host. In a society long dominated by the Church, profaning the sacred was the ultimate transgression. They even become verbs: to 'câlisser' someone out means to kick them out. Swearing in France, by contrast, leans on sexual and scatological words.
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.