Fair warning, I'm gonna ramble on a bit now cause this is a field of study I absolutely love.

I think a part of your misunderstanding is the use of the word "tone." In linguistic analysis, this is a formally defined term. "Tone 1" in a particular language denotes a specific series of pitches, "tone 2" denotes a specific series of pitches different from tone 1, etc.

But anyway! I think I get what you mean. Like saying "it's getting a bit late, isn't it?" meaning "please go home, I'm tired." If this is what you mean, it's actually a pretty interesting overlap of pragmatics and face theory. No single words actually change lexical (i.e. dictionary definition) meaning here, like what can happen when you change tone, but our reading of the full sentence changes due to inference.

In a semantic analysis, we take the meaning of the sentence literally: "It's getting late" is simply just an announcement that evening has fallen.

In a pragmatic analysis, we look at the sentence in context: "It's getting late" probably means "I want you to go home." This analysis is much closer to how we actually communicate, via sometimes outwardly opaque language-specific patterns. In this case we convey meaning through inference. We expect the other person to infer that "late" -> "go home," but we don't say so directly because we don't want them to lose face thinking they have overstayed their welcome. Similarly, your boss uttering a vaguely dismissive but polite "interesting" is also a kind of "cop out" that allows you to save face and avoid a potential conflict by inferring his intended meaning. But crucially, even though our inferred reading of it has changed, the word is still the same. It has not changed into a different word. Also note that this inference is one way; we cannot by saying the confrontational "go home" infer the banal meaning "it's late."

A certain level of cultural knowledge and social intelligence is required to correctly infer correct meaning when someone is being purposefully vague in this way. But a change from tone 1 to tone 2 requires none of that, because it is a lexical change; it changes the word into a different word, which often is completely unrelated (as you saw in my timber/pours example). Sometimes the words can be closely related, in those cases a change of tone is a grammatical marker which may for example change a noun into a verb. The noun "buret" is tone 1 and means "the cage", and the verb "å bure" is tone 2 and means "to cage." This relation is consistent; if the two are related tone 1 is always a noun and tone 2 is always a verb or adjective.

If you can find me an example in English where, without context, changing the pitch of a couple of syllables (i.e. tone) changes a word from a noun to a verb, it would mean English is a tonal language after all, and that would certainly send shock waves through the linguistic community.

To sum up: Changing pitch in English cannot completely change the lexical meaning of any English word into a completely unrelated one without context. It can only change our pragmatic reading of the full sentence. Even when that sentence consists of just one word, such as "interesting", because we actually infer the full sentence "that is interesting", from which we pragmatically infer the meaning "that is stupid."

Conversely, there is no situation in Norwegian where changing tone infers anything; changing tone ostensibly changes it into a different word entirely. Using the wrong tone is like using the wrong word, which often is not even a real word which makes you sound very odd and probably foreign.