Or indeed, ancient Chinese! Which IIRC was non tonal. There's some linguistic pattern where consonant clusters at the end of words get dropped, but their 'effe

Or indeed, ancient Chinese! Which IIRC was non tonal. There's some linguistic pattern where consonant clusters at the end of words get dropped, but their 'effect' on the vowel remains and that's how these kind of tones develop. IIRC there's also two different kind of tones, pitch tones, and register tones.... Languages are crazy.