Depends on the language. One I can think of off the top of my head:
C:
1. int *number;
2. number = &someothernumber;
3. *number = 5;

In this case * means two different (albeit related) things:
1. Declaring a 'pointer' (*) to an integer called number
2. Making number point to the 'address of' (&) someothernumber
3. Setting the 'value of' (*) number to be 5.

If you were to do "int *number = 5" then you would be:
1. Declaring a 'pointer' (*) to an integer called number
2. Making the pointer point at memory address 5.

You can see that the meaning of * depends on whether you are declaring something, or assigning something, but it gets confusing when you are doing both at once (as in the second example). That little niggle is a big stumbling block for newbies learning C, took me a while to get my head around it.


As for your little example, some possible, although fairly weak, suggestions as to why this is:

'go home' - home is not neccesarily a fixed place, when you are on holiday you can say 'go home' and mean your hotel room, when you are at work you can say 'go home' and mean your house. Saying 'go home' is also posessive - homes are generally owned or associated with people, but saying 'go to the home' loses this association with the speaker. 'go home' is also an action, as in 'I am about to go home', saying 'go to home' makes 'go to' the action and 'home' a place. But the fact that 'go home' is already an action in an of itself makes the 'to' redundant.

'go to work' - work is not neccesarily a fixed place, or it can even ben an activity in this sense, sort of like 'get to work'. You can also do the same type of work at many different places, so its sort of 'go to work (at the factory)' or 'go to work (at the paper mill)'. Similarly, 'go to the work' loses all association and posession with the speaker. The case against 'go work' is harder, and to be honest this is actually used in some cases (I know I've used it); "I'm gonna go work (on something)".

'go to the park' - when you are talking about a park, you are generally talking about a specific park, rather than a park that changes places. Or, if you aren't talking about a specific park, when you say 'go to the park' the thing that you are going to generally shares a lot of qualities with other parks - wide open grass, probably children's play sets, probably some soccer/rugby/other goalposts around, compared to 'work' which can be any business at all, or 'home' which can likewise be anything from a wooden hovel to a grand palace. Also, people do not usually posess parks themselves, so there is no reason to imply posession when talking about going to a park.

 

As far as Mexican chains go, Chipotle blows both Rubio's and Baja Fresh out of the water. Monsterous burritos. Also free drinks for students!

 

But Lanth, your examples show that English is even worse. Not only are the words arbitrary, but they mean multiple things depending on the usage.

You can go home, go work, and go park, but only because last 2 are verbs as well as nouns. Hell, you could "go home" as a verb too, with the meaning of acquire a target, as a missile does towards a radar installation. You hear about how many words various hanzi symbols can mean in Chinese or Japanese, with context and the other adjacent symbols determining it, but is english with the overlapping noun/verb usages really any better?

 

For unknown reasons, this is making me think of a usage problem totally unrelated to anything you mentioned. That is the use of the letter "o" in place of the number "0".

I used to have to speak with people who spoke only Spanish, or a little English at best, and I quickly learned that using the letter "o" was horribly confusing for them. Our merchant I.D. was 60401, which I would say 6o4o1 out of habit, and they would invariably ask me to repeat myself. It took a lot of work to break myself of the habit, but it now saves me a lot of time anytime I have to give numbers over the telephone. Even if you are talking to someone fluent in English, if you say 53oo6 fairly quickly, it will sound like you only say o once (seriously, try it), where if you say 5 3 Zero Zero 6 they will get it the first time every time.

And as long as I am bitching about odd number abbreviations, I gotta bring up one that most of the Spanish speaking people did that confused me. Using the old merchant I.D., 60401, when they would say it to me, often times they would say "sesenta cuarenta uno". That wasn't too bad, since I already knew what number they were talking about, but when they used the same method for numbers (such as dollar values) I would get a bit confused. If they said "treinta cinco", they could be meaning 35 or 30 5 (technically, if they were saying 35, they would be saying treinta y cinco but I challenge you to pick the "y" out of a sentence spoken by someone who speaks Spanish as a first language). Why they would ever use treinta cinco for 305 instead of trescientos y cinco is beyond me, but enough of them did it that I have to assume that it is fairly common.

I am sure that their usuage of the numbers in that way was every bit as wrong as my usage of o in place of a number, but if the teachers in school let you get by with such abbreviations, you will continue to use them. Which sucks, 'cause it is a lot easier to learn something correctly than to learn it incorrectly and retrain yourself.


Now, as for the English language, we need to scrap it and start over. Seriously. You tear a ligament, which hurts and makes you shed a tear. So you go home and drown the pain with a beer. Why don't you cry a teer (here you need to be in a seat on the second tier just to keep this thing going. But it's all good if you are a proficient knot tier) and drink a bear? Oh yeah, because a bear is a huge, vicious animal (keep those pointy teeth away from my bare skin!). Not confusing at all!

 

Romanus eunt domus. Or was it Romani ite domum? :)

 

English sucks. So does every other human language.

Human languages are constantly changing and have very very sophisticated and subtle rules most of which depend upon context, and this is part of the reason that artificial intelligence has been so elusive thus far. People simply haven't come up with a decent way of storing all of the rules of language in a database so that they can be accessed quickly and correctly. There also seems to be some sort of critical mass involved - once a set of rules becomes large enough and comprehensive enough, it is argued by some that it will spontanously develop intelligence, or at least what we would perceive of as intelligence.

Take these two sentences, neither of which you have probably seen before side by side: A pen is in the box. The box is in a pen. Both of these sentences are valid, when pens refer both to writing instrument and an enclosure. But how do you tell a computer the two different meanings and how to diffentiate when each is being used, and get it to do so 100% flawlessly, as well as enable it to determine the meaning of new sentences which it has never seen before? Humans can do that with generally little error, but trying to teach a computer to do the same has so far been impossible.

So unless artificial intelligence is developed (somehow), or people start using much more logical and predictive languages, it will never be possible to speak to a computer in a human language and have it understand you 100% of the time.