In French, a 'vasistas' is a small hinged pane at the top of a door or window. The word comes from German 'Was ist das?', meaning 'What is that?'. The usual explanation is that this was the question called through the opening to whoever stood outside. First recorded in French in the 18th century, it froze into a French-looking spelling: a whole sentence turned into a window.
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.