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Does the difference in sound of these two words in English imply that at one time to "go in the past" was not understood as being related to going in the present? Or that there was no way to express the idea in English so it was borrowed from another language?

I think Mandarin has nothing like this divergence between "go" and "went" and German does not either (could be wrong on German but I think "went" is "gegangen" or something that sounds related to present tense and Mandarin has a very clear and regular way of doing stuff like this.)

relesabe
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    That's called suppletion and it's explained well in that Wiki article. Another English example is be – am, is, are, was, were which are all the forms of a single word. Naturally, Mandarin has nothing like that because in Mandarin words don't inflect for any grammar category. – Yellow Sky Jul 28 '20 at 19:33
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    By the way, German sein - bin - ist - war or gut - besser, viel - mehr are examples of suppletion. – Yellow Sky Jul 28 '20 at 19:37
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    @YellowSky Mandarin does have something like suppletion, in a broader sense; for example, the simple verb negator ‘not’ is 不 bù with all verbs except the verb 有 yǒu ‘have’, where it’s 没 méi instead. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 28 '20 at 19:37
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    There were many past forms for 'go' in the dialects of Old and Middle English. The one that finally stuck in Modern English is from the same root as wend, replacing the earlier oede or gang forms. Suppletion is a way of life when dialects mix. – jlawler Jul 28 '20 at 19:44
  • @JanusBahsJacquet - That Chinese negator case doesn't fit the idea of suppletion, since 不 bù and 没 méi are not a part of a paradigm in which all the rest of the members are formed by affixes, not by a different morpheme. It doesn't even look like the "lion - lioness, tiger - tigress vs. horse - mare and dog - bitch" stuff. It's more like when everybody say "yes", but in parliament they say "aye". :D – Yellow Sky Jul 28 '20 at 19:50
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: mei and bu i remember from first quarter. puzzling. – relesabe Jul 28 '20 at 19:53
  • @YellowSky Hence why I said something like suppletion. As you say, Chinese cannot have suppletion since there is no such thing as a paradigm, but this is something not too far removed from it. It’s more akin to do-support in English, which is also a separate way to form negatives specific to certain verbs, though of course the mechanics are different. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 28 '20 at 19:56
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    All Germanic languages have a lot of suppletion in their version of the verb to be, including German (bin/bist vs ist/sind/seid/sein, war(en)/wäre(n)/gewesen, etc.). German also has gehen and ging/gegangen, which are suppletive, though they look quite a lot like each other, so many don’t know that they are. Apart from that, I can’t think of any suppletion in German either. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 28 '20 at 20:12
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: "to be" is very abstract and i can see how people struggled with the concepts of various tenses. – relesabe Jul 28 '20 at 20:23
  • @relesabe Not just tenses – bin/ist/sind are all the same tense, but suppletive. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 28 '20 at 20:25
  • @JanusBahsJacquet - German denken – dachte and bringen – brachte look no less suppletive than gehen – ging. – Yellow Sky Jul 28 '20 at 20:38
  • @YellowSky Exactly why most people aren’t aware that gehen/ging is suppletion. Unless you happen to know their etymologies, you really have no way of knowing that they’re not cognate. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 28 '20 at 20:40
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    Does this answer your question? What causes suppletion? – Keelan Jul 28 '20 at 20:41
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    @relesabe I think you're mistaken in your apparent belief that suppletion is caused by people "struggling with the concepts of tenses", or struggling with any other grammatical concept for that matter. Languages aren't learned that way anyway, except in school. Suppletion doesn't happen because people fail to grasp their language's structures. – LjL Jul 28 '20 at 20:49
  • @LjL: how do we know what causes suppletion? – relesabe Jul 28 '20 at 21:25
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    @relesabe Suppletion has arisen in languages in recent times and are in fact in the process of arising right now. In English, for example, the singular noun people started to be used as an indefinite plural noun, but it has no direct singular counterpart in that sense. Conversely, as people became more common as a plural noun, the actual plural persons has become less common, to the extent that in unmarked, colloquial speech, people frequently functions as the plural of person – a suppletive paradigm is born, right before our eyes, and not because anyone struggles with ‘persons’. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 28 '20 at 22:50
  • As with most language changes, we can identify the direct causes that have the effect observed as a change, but there is no way to know what the underlying reason is. Asking ‘why’ about language structure and language change is usually futile – like asking why English has adjectives or a past tense (there are languages which do fine without both), or why it doesn’t have telicity markers or ergative. It just does/doesn’t. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 28 '20 at 22:55
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    The relevant WALS chapter is 79: 'Suppletion According to Tense and Aspect'. There is also chapter 80: 'Verbal Number and Suppletion'; both are by Ljuba Veselinova, who knows her stuff. These constitute a large part of her PhD dissertation. – jlawler Jul 30 '20 at 21:20

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According to Etymology Dictionary:

"The Old English past tense was eode, a word of uncertain origin but evidently once a different verb (perhaps connected to Gothic iddja); it was replaced 1400s by went, past tense of wenden "to direct one's way".

The previous suppletive verb form was considered as confusing because, after reduction, looked like a dental suffix "ed(e)".

The past form of the synonymous verb wend was a good solution to this situation.

user307254
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    Worth noting that this suppletion has caused blocking in Modern English: even though wend (ending in a nasal + voiced stop) still has the right root structure to form a shortened -t past tense (like spend > spent), the past tense of wend is now only wended – because obviously went is already taken as the past-tense form of the much more common verb go. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 29 '20 at 13:19
  • Could OE eode be related to Czech, jít, jezdit etc – Omar and Lorraine Jul 30 '20 at 06:19
  • Though we don't know the etymology of the verb, "eode" has some resemblance with modern Slavonic verbs of the same semantics (for example, Russian JEZDIT', JEDU, etc.). – user307254 Aug 01 '20 at 10:05