@ RiotNrrd:

Perhaps different versions of "be" may be beneficial to a slight extent with keeping the mind malleable. Ironically though, as we can see in Modern English, the strength of the various forms of "be" and even the pronouns is slowly decreasing (lolcats being a good demonstration ), so it seems that the mind prefers ambiguity, and having to problem solve the meaning of a word, over having it clearly spelt out.

(Even in ancient languages this seemed present - the semitic languages' vocabularies for example come from 3 letter roots, e.g. ktb = to write, writing, book (and has morphed into newspaper correspondent in hebrew I believe), and while nowadays these different meanings are differentiated by different vowels (and in Hebrew with lenited consonants, e.g. b > v), in the beginning "ktb" may have stood for all those different things and had no difference in pronunciation. Set rules about what vowels go where could probably even be an ancient form of making words less ambiguous, which'd be interesting...)

Also, having cases over prepositions may perhaps loosen the burden on a speaker due to the concise/compact nature of the language (in most cases - Latin goes to show that even with short case endings, words can still become massive).

I suspect it's a minor effect though, and may be trumped by the cognitive practice one gets from deciphering vague words (to an extent - Toki Pona for example seems to be lacking some concepts due to its minimisation).

Well... the one benefit I can see from irregularity is redundancy. If someone says something, but the environment is too noisy and you only catch the verb but not the pronoun, you may be able to infer the pronoun from the form of the verb, whereas if you just catch "estas", there are no clues as to which pronoun it's paired with.

You could consider this a kind of conceptual redundancy. Esperanto generally lacks this kind of redundancy in favor of more structural (and regular) redundancies (e.g., adjectives agreeing in number with nouns, thus indicating which nouns they pair with).

So... there ARE potential benefits to irregularity. However, I still don't see that that increases the level of sophistication of what might be said.

I think the said redundancy could be done regularly after all, maybe?

(E.g. In Volapük, depending on how you analyse its grammar, verbs are conjugated by simply adding the personal pronoun to the end (I myself argue that the language has a Topic+Verb+Subject+Object order, where the Topic is the optional use of a noun to refer to the 3rd person subject, and the subject is the pronominal verb ending - but it could just as well be analysed as Subject+(Verb+SubjectPronoun)+Object I guess).

I dunno how the Esperantistaro would feel about "Mi lernas-mi Esperanton" though....

The redundancy in Esperanto is found in adjective/noun agreement, and also in word order, and also in the -n ending. Using -n, we can put the sentence in any order we want -- but we usually don't. And especially in a noisy environment where misunderstanding is possible, we don't.

So we can suppose that "Mi amas v^#" means "Mi amas vin", even with out the -n, because "mi" lacks -n, and also because of the word order.

"Mi*#* amas la brunan hund*#&@" could be understood easily to mean "Mi amas la brunan hundon", using adjective agreement and word order.

Esperanto is a lot like English in this way. English also has very few different verb forms to distinguish between grammatical person. And presumably Chinese must come up with a way to work in some redundancy to help preserve meaning; its verbs are much more simple than Esperanto verbs.