Indeed, the same happens in Thai (which I know much better than Mandarin). There is a second layer of 'tones' to indicate these 'emotions'. But the related variations are slower.
The most fascinating part of this for me is how people learn and forget this aspect of language. At childhood, we necessarily have the capacity to understand this. But then, in some areas of the world, we learn that the tone (You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.) is used to distinguish meaning of individual words, while in other areas it is entirely related to emotion. The latter applies to almost all of Europe, and certainly the area in which the Voynich MS was most probably written.
The notion that tones are used to distinguish words that are otherwise similar is quite foreign to European ears. The capacity to understand this, that must have been there at childhood, is lost while growing up. For me, I had to 'learn it again'.
There is a classical example in the Thai language, that the words for 'nearby' and 'far away', which are opposites to each other, are the same except for the tone. They are a minimal pair in that sense. When explaining this to European friends, the (quite obvious to me) difference was not noticed.
So, while this is surely quite off-topic, the relevance w.r.t the Voynich MS is that it seems extremely unlikely that the person or people involved in its production had a notion of tones...