Created in 2001 by Canadian linguist Sonja Lang, Toki Pona, 'the good language', bets on radical simplicity: 14 sounds and about 120 core words in its official 2014 book. Everything else is built by combining them: a friend is 'jan pona', a good person, and alcohol is 'telo nasa', crazy water. Partly inspired by Taoism, it pushes speakers to boil every idea down to its essence.
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.