I was briefly reading Minsky’s Society of Mind and found these passages memorable.
The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. That’s why it’s almost always wrong to seek “the real meaning” of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.
The smaller two languages are the harder it will be to translate between them. This is not because there are too many meanings, but because there are too few. The fewer things an agent does, the less likely that what another agent does will correspond to any of those things. And if two agents have nothing in common, no translation is conceivable.