The other day, I received a message on Instagram. More often than not, I delete message requests as most appear like spam or unsolicited contact requests. However, this one was different; what direction would I point someone who were to make sense of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty?
«When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.»
(Lewis Carroll: “Through the Looking-Glass”, 1871)
Humans append meaning to words all the time, in all languages. We’re heavily dependent on understanding a speaker’s language to make sense of their utterances. But in addition to that, we rely on having a shared understanding of individual words. That’s why Humpty Dumpty is both right and wrong. On the one hand, words’ meaning depends on the speaker and what they put into a word. After all, you choose the words you think mean precisely what you want to say. But on the other hand, even more importantly is someone else’s perception of the same word, as it might differ from the speaker’s intentions. Had only the speakers’ intention mattered, we would have had few misunderstandings and no miscommunication. If you’ve touched upon linguistics, chances are you have needed the theory to explain the relationship between words and their meaning.
Semiotics helps us illustrate this. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a French linguist and semiotician who studied the relationship between words and their meaning. The model he offered suggests that a sign consists of two parts; the signifier and the signified. The relationship between a signifier and the signified is what helps us provide meaning to words. If we follow this, then a word alone (the signifier) will have no meaning until we connect it with its meaning (the signified). The theory itself can be hard to grasp, but in essence we, can assume that we learn both the signifier and the signified at once because one would have no meaning without the other. Strictly speaking, we can argue that “book” alone is simply a word, and has no meaning — this is the signifier. It’s first when we apply the physical item, the signified that make up the actual book, that we’ve connected the two.
You may or may not have heard about semiotics. Nevertheless, if you have looked at more than one programming language, you have come across practical illustrations of this. The sign of variable is likely to mean the same across programming languages. Still, without learning the details of the programming language, we cannot trust that we have connected the signifier variable with its right meaning, the signified variable. And we come across this all the time.
When communicating, both in natural languages and programming languages, we are dependent on a shared understanding of words and signs. We’ve practised interpreting meaning in human speech all our lives but may not have drawn the conclusions in formal languages such as programming languages. Hopefully, we appreciate Humpty Dumpty’s utterance a little more when we think of this as being translatable across domains.
