I wonder why vowels ever evolved. It doesn&#x27;t seem to make any sense to have the same words mean different things if you can just make a different word. After all, what&#x27;s really the difference between bat and bet and bit and bot and but? It&#x27;s clearly all the same word!<p>Sarcasm aside though, a whole lot of languages are tonal. Most languages spoken in Asia and many African ones are. And you use tone too: what&#x27;s the difference between &quot;You there.&quot; and &quot;You there?&quot; and &quot;You there!&quot;. It just serves a different purpose in English than it does in Chinese so it seems less mysterious to an English speaker.<p>The only tonal language I can really speak about is Mandarin (although I encourage you to read about other systems). The way the tones work in Mandarin isn&#x27;t as complicated as it sounds. The classic example is this[1]:<p>1. mā (妈, mother). This sounds like a somewhat high-pitched, steady tone<p>2. má (麻, hemp). This is called a rising tone, and it sounds sort of like the end of a question in English<p>3. mǎ (马, horse). This tone falls and then rises (sort of like a #4 then a #2). Imagine a whiny child saying &quot;mooooom!&quot; to get their mom&#x27;s attention<p>4. mà (骂, scold). This tone falls quickly, it sounds like in the movies when someone shouts &quot;Hey!&quot; at a robber that&#x27;s getting away<p>5. ma (吗, an interrogative particle). This is a neutral tone, its sound depends mostly on the syllable before it but in isolation it either falls slightly or sounds like an English &quot;toneless&quot; syllable.<p>Mandarin only has those 5 tones, it&#x27;s not like &quot;ma&quot; can sound fifteen different ways. They aren&#x27;t differentiated by the pitch itself exactly, it&#x27;s whether the pitch is rising or falling.<p>A Chinese speaker might describe the difference between má and mà the same way you&#x27;d describe the difference between &quot;bet&quot; and &quot;bit&quot; to a speaker of a language that doesn&#x27;t differentiate those vowels. Sort of like rhyming, but not quite. As an easier example, Spanish doesn&#x27;t really have a contrastive &#x2F;ɪ&#x2F; as in &quot;bit&quot;, so a Spanish speaker might have the same trouble differentiating or producing it without some practise that you might have doing the same to má or mǎ.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tone_(linguistics)#Mechanics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Tone_(linguistics)#Mechanics</a>