In August 1539, King Francis I signed the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts. Its articles 110 and 111 require legal documents to be written 'en langage maternel françois', in the French mother tongue, rather than Latin, so that everyone could understand rulings affecting them. Both articles are still in force, among the oldest French legislation still applied. The château has housed an international centre for the French language since 2023.
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.