How... do.... I pick things up in Gothic 1? I remapped the keyboard controls a bit to run a little more similar to "Morrowind" since that's what I'm used to, but I can't seem to figure out how to pick up things laying on the ground or how to take things from chests. I looked on Gamefaqs for a tutorial on the controls but I was a little confused still.

Hold down ctrl to focus the item and press forward(w).
I think LMB instead of ctrl works too.

So that's why there's two buttons mapped to every action. SILLYNESS!!!!!

Well, like everywhere else in Gothic they wanted to do a hell of a lot of more than what they were able to finish.
They probably planed to have different actions you can do with a item or they wnted to have a general control scheme.

For instance to open a locked chest you have to focus it break the lock by typing the correct combination with left/right and open it using forward. In combatmode there are actually four differnent actions one for each direction key.