Repetition of words

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The Mandarin neutral tone is a toneless utterance. The ‘word’ ma has five meanings dependent on tone. Mother, hemp, horse, curse, question-mark are the five meanings.

Ni3 hao3 means hello but Ni3 hao3 ma means How are you?

Inded, my guess was quite wrong: it seems that the Madarin language uses only ~1300 distinct syllables, which are split roughly evenly among the four main tones (from ~250 of tone 2 to ~350 of tone 3).  IIUC, the neutral tone syllables with distinct meaning add a couple hundred to that total.

So the ~1270 count in that sample actually is surprisingly high. 

And I believe all words in Japanese ‘could’ be written with the 46 syllables if katakana.

Or hiragana. Yes, but the basic syllables can be modified by a 'voicing" diacritc that turns e.g. "ta" into "da", and a specific diacritic that makes "pa" out of "ha"; and by replacing the vowel to make e.g. "fe" from "fu"+small "e"; or by replacing the vowel with a glide, e.g. "ki"+small "ya" = "kya".  And then by lenghteting the vowel, e.g. "to"+"u" = "tō".  And then doubling the consonant, e.g. small "tsu" + "ka" = "kka".

All the best, --stolfi