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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;The Eidolon, post: 5456790, member: 102103&quot;]The tones definitely distinguish one word from another, but the part of speech is more determined by word order than tone.&nbsp; Chinese has many dialects.&nbsp; Some have a few tones (Mandarin has 4 or 5, depending on how you count).&nbsp; Cantonese has about twice as many.&nbsp; I&#039;ve heard Guilin has a relatively flat dialect with fewer tonal variations.&nbsp; All use the same grammar though.&nbsp; I don&#039;t think it&#039;s related to the degree of inflection really.</p><p><br /></p><p>You know how in English, some tenses are designated by helper words (&quot;I go&quot; to &quot;I will go&quot;) for future tense and others by conjugation (&quot;I go&quot; to &quot;I went&quot;) for past tense?&nbsp; in Chinese, it&#039;s almost all helper words and no conjugation.&nbsp; So 去 qu (go) becomes 去了 (went) or 在去 (am going) 要去 (will go).&nbsp; You just add one more character to indicate the tense.&nbsp; Even if everyone pronounces those characters differently, you can still understand that they mean the same ideas.&nbsp; Except for a few word choice differences, you can&#039;t even really tell what dialect something was written in just by the characters.</p><p><br /></p><p>When a heavily inflected language like Japanese uses Chinese characters, they had to make a lot of adjustments to make it work.&nbsp; They ditch (most of) the helper words and invented a whole new phonetic alphabet made of simplified cursive characters to indicate the conjugation sounds.&nbsp; So for &quot;taberu&quot; 食べる (to eat), the first Chinese style character tells you the meaning and the next one or two tell you the sound of the conjugation (present tense).&nbsp; You can change the phonetic characters to change to 食べない (not eat) 食べた (ate) 食べたい (want to eat) etc.&nbsp; But the root character stays the same.&nbsp; Japanese is also not very tonal, but I think that&#039;s just a coincidence.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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