Almost every language names tea in one of two ways. Forms like 'tea' come from Min Nan on the Chinese coast, from where the Dutch shipped it by sea. Forms like 'chai', in Russian, Persian or Hindi, followed overland routes. The exception is Portuguese chá: its gateway, Macau, spoke Cantonese.
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.