Redundancy in language (#66; Topic L)

A 1/26/06 cartoon, Frank and Ernest, shows soldiers with sandwich boards: 3 on one side, carrying TALK, JUMP, and WALK; 4 on the other side, carrying BRING, THINK, GO, and THROW. I did not get it, until I saw a banner about them: VERB ARMY HQ, and a message: "Ah, here comes the irregulars." It dawned on me that, while the first three verbs merely add -ed to form past tense and past participle, conjugating the last four is a challenge: bought, bought; thought, thought; went, gone; and threw, thrown, respectively -- no rhyme or reason, just regurgitate, thank you. One says: "I saw a movie yesterday." To one with Chinese as the mother tongue, that simple sentence contains redundancy (unneeded complications) -- with yesterday, the timing of the action has been fully disclosed: it happened in the past. Why bother with a verb form that states, again, that this action has taken place? And this verb form is not for emphasis (for which one would say: "I did see a movie yesterday"). If I go to see a movie, why it has to be "He goes to see a movie"? Why the verb form is different for a first-person singular and a third-person singular doing the same thing? The Chinese language asks one to think, not to regurgitate; to use logic, not to follow blindly. In Chinese, one says: "I 'see' a movie yesterday" and "He 'go' to see a movie" -- the verb form does not change with time nor with the subject; who does/did what can be inferred from the context. In Chinese, "I 'do' dishes tomorrow" and "He 'do' dishes yesterday" convey clearly the schedule -- there is no redundancy. In the 17th century, Jesuits went to China and wrote back what they saw. On the Chinese language, Leibniz was so excited to see Chinese's simplicity and logical construction that he proposed to his friends that Chinese be adopted as the universal language. One can understand Leibniz's excitement, since German is more complex (more redundancy) than English -- and Latin, the scholarly language at the time, is even more complex. Regrettably, Leibniz did not gain a following; his proposal died with his passing.
Posted at 10:53 pm, Friday, February 3, 2006 (For reasons unclear, this posting disappeared from the site; it is reposted at 6:38 pm, Saturday, February 11, 2006.)