I wonder why vowels ever evolved. It doesn't seem to make any sense to have the same words mean different things if you can just make a different word. After al

I wonder why vowels ever evolved. It doesn'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's really the difference between bat and bet and bit and bot and but? It's clearly all the same word! 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's the difference between "You there." and "You there?" and "You there!". It just serves a different purpose in English than it does in Chinese so it seems less mysterious to an English speaker. 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't as complicated as it sounds. The classic example is this[1]: 1. mā (妈, mother). This sounds like a somewhat high-pitched, steady tone 2. má (麻, hemp). This is called a rising tone, and it sounds sort of like the end of a question in English 3. mǎ (马, horse). This tone falls and then rises (sort of like a #4 then a #2). Imagine a whiny child saying "mooooom!" to get their mom's attention 4. mà (骂, scold). This tone falls quickly, it sounds like in the movies when someone shouts "Hey!" at a robber that's getting away 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 "toneless" syllable. Mandarin only has those 5 tones, it's not like "ma" can sound fifteen different ways. They aren't differentiated by the pitch itself exactly, it's whether the pitch is rising or falling. A Chinese speaker might describe the difference between má and mà the same way you'd describe the difference between "bet" and "bit" to a speaker of a language that doesn't differentiate those vowels. Sort of like rhyming, but not quite. As an easier example, Spanish doesn't really have a contrastive /ɪ/ as in "bit", 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)#Mechanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)#Mechanics