Over at Wordorigins, in a thread on the term mind meld, Syntinen Laulu commented:
Surely meld in the card-game sense (it’s used in the game of tarot, too) is an entirely unrelated word, cognate with Dutch and German melden, to report. (Comparable to declare in bridge or bezique.)
To anyone in the Central European side of my family, the word is unshakeably associated with the Good Soldier Svejk, who routinely prefixes anything he says to anyone in authority with ‘Ich melde gehorsamst’ – ‘I report most respectfully’. (I have often wondered if he says it in German in the original – did Czech soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army have to use German phrases such as this? And if not, what dies he say in Czech? Anyone here know?)
I responded:
The full novel in Czech is here; turns out he uses both the German expression (“Ich melde gehorsamst, Herr Feldwebel…”) and the Czech equivalent, Poslušně hlásím (“‘Poslušně hlásím, pane feldkurát,’ řekl Švejk”). I’m glad you asked — what an interesting situation!
I report it here both for the bilingualism and for the fact that the text is online — I no longer have to (very faintly) regret having given away my Czech copy of the novel.
Addendum. Googling turned up this splended occurrence in a (Habsburg) Hungarian context, from Péter Hajdu’s “Hungarian Writers on the Military Mission of Austria-Hungary in the Balkans: Viceroy Kállay and Good Soldier Tömörkény” (Hungarian Studies 21 [2007]: 297-314):
The general language of command was German, but a regiment was ethnically homogeneous and used its own native language. Therefore the army’s language was a special mixture in every regiment. Without actual knowledge of German the soldiers used some words of opaque significance with distorted pronunciation. Tömörkény, a native speaker of German, enjoys the opportunity to make fun of that soldier’s German by putting sentences on the paper in Hungarian transliteration. The disappearance of signification on the level of words might be suggested by the following example:
… the warrant officers make their reports that men have clean underwear on, and they have also washed their feet. It is really beautiful in German when they report instead of “Wäsche gewächselt, Füsse gewaschen” that “vesse gevassen, füsze gevekszelt, meldige hozzám”. ( “Szabad nap” [A day’s leave], Tömörkény 1958b, 63)
The Hungarian warrant officer’s linguistic incompetence is displayed by the phonetic transcription of his sentence in a characteristically Hungarian spelling, which suggests that what he is speaking is actually not German, but the confusion of the two languages (actually he says “underwear washed, feet exchanged”), and this is also shown by the popular etymology of the last phrase. He changes the borderline between the words of the phrase “[Ich] melde gehorsam” [I humbly report] to harmonise it with the Hungarian rules of accent and to put a Hungarian word at the end. “Hozzám” means ‘up to me’, but it cannot mean anything in this alien context. No matter, how the words of the sentence are pronounced, how its words are regrouped or substituted by Hungarian words, the utterance is one single unit of significance that performs its function notwithstanding any deformation.
And check out “Mimochodom” here (Karikatury, 1909).
At the time that was no more remarkable than today’s “sir yes sir!”, in the lower military ranks at any rate. “Gehorsamst” could however also be used higher up, like many other flowery acknowledgement of superior status in French and English. That’s been my impression from novels.
“Držte hubu,” přerušil Švejka zuřivě předseda komise, “o vás už máme zprávy. Der Kerl meint: man wird glauben, er sei ein wirklicher Idiot… ádnej idiot nejste, Švejku, chytrej jste, mazanej jste, lump jste, uličník, všivák, rozumíte…”
“Poslušně hlásím, že rozumím.”
“Už jsem vám říkal, abyste držel hubu, slyšel jste?”
“Poslušně hlásím, že jsem slyšel, abych držel hubu.”
“Himlhergot, tak tu hubu držte, když jsem vám poručil, tak víte dobře, že nesmíte kušnit!”
“Poslušně hlásím, že vím, že nesmím kušnit.”
—
“Shut up,” interrupted the chairman of the committee, furiously, “we already have news about you. Der Kerl meint: man wird glauben, er sei ein wirklicher Idiot… You’re not an idiot, Svejk, you’re clever, you’re cunning, you’re a rogue, you’re a scoundrel, you understand…”
“I obediently report that I understand.”
“I told you to shut up, did you hear?”
“I’m sorry to say [lit. I obediently report that] I heard you tell me to shut up.”
“Himlhergot, shut your mouth, you know you mustn’t kiss my ass!”
“[I obediently report that]I know I mustn’t kiss.”
Translated with DeepL.com
—
Dunno why DeepL elides/substitutes the last two occurrences of the phrase.
No – “most obediently”. Just like “your most obedient servant”.
gewechselt, no relation to Wachs “wax”, wachsen “wax”* or wachsen “wax”* – but the pronunciation would be identical.
* Putting wax on skis for example.
** Grow. I couldn’t resist the temptation to wax… not eloquent… circumtidulate.
I hadn’t understood the card game sense of “meld”, not having played any game where it features. I probably have met it in passing, and assumed it was the same as the later word — some kind of merger rather than a declaration.
I am all for kissing ass (as a literary expression, to be be completely clear), but why DeepL found it in this dialog? I don’t know Czech, but “tak víte dobře, že nesmíte kušnit” is not some complicated case – “you very well know that you ought not to blubber”. The latter word is apparently rare or obsolete, as Czech Wiktionary attests citing this very phrase.
BTW, “shut up” in Czech was “držte hubu” which is literally “hold your lip”. In Russian, it is “bite your tongue” which is very informal to more conventionally informal “shut your mouth”. Don’t have time or energy to investigate where “držte hubu” is on informality scale in Czech.
i’ll have to go look, but if memory serves, in [Trouble on] Triton, delany uses “meld” in the context of the elaborate board game, vlet (whose name he adopted from a similar game in one of joanna russ’ Alyx stories), to mean “combine”, as opposed to “declare”, though i’m pretty sure that those moves involve some degree of revelation of a player’s resources.
According to etymonline, it is as rozele suggests.
“ meld (v.)
“to blend together, merge, unite” (intransitive), by 1910, of uncertain origin. OED suggests “perh. a blend of MELT v.1 and WELD v.” Said elsewhere to be a verb use of melled “mingled, blended,” past participle of dialectal mell “to mingle, mix, combine, blend.”
[T]he biplane grew smaller and smaller, the stacatto clatter of the motor became once more a drone which imperceptibly became melded with the waning murmur of country sounds …. [“Aircraft” magazine, October 1910]
But it is perhaps an image from card-playing, where the verb meld is attested by 1907 in a sense of “combine two cards for a score:”
Upon winning a trick, and before drawing from the stock, the player can “meld” certain combinations of cards. [rules for two-hand pinochle in “Hoyle’s Games,” 1907]
The rise of the general sense of the word in English coincides with the craze for canasta, in which melding figures. The card-playing sense is said to be “apparently” from German melden “make known, announce,” from Old High German meldon, from Proto-Germanic *meldojanan (source of Old English meldian “to declare, tell, display, proclaim”), and the notion is of “declaring” the combination of cards. Related: Melded; melding.
also from 1910”
The immortal Švejk’s approach to authority will be a valuable resource for us all in the days ahead.
Must read Trouble on Triton again. Apart from anything else, it’s a masterclass in having a thoroughly repellent POV character protagonist without alienating the reader or getting boring.
Kušnit ‘blabber, prattle, natter, yap’ is doubtless denominative from kušna ‘muzzle’, or of people, ‘trap, yap, gob’ (as in ‘Shut your – !’). Apparently from a form of Gosche, Gusche ‘mouth, gob, yap’ in some variety of German. Pfeifer on Gusche:
when they report instead of “Wäsche gewächselt, Füsse gewaschen” that “vesse gevassen, füsze gevekszelt, meldige hozzám”
This really made my day. Thanks for this post!
While we are on Švejk, a gentle reminder to Hat to read Ivan Chonkin (if you haven’t already).
I was surprised to learn that meld in the “merge, blend” sense is relatively new, and used to be a peeve target, according to Merriam-Webster’s usage note:
Not one of the high-profile peeves — I’d never heard of it, and American Heritage never had a note on it. Google managed to scrape up an example, from the astoundingly late date of 2009, in the Sunday Times: “misused”, “common in commerce”, yada yada. Google also informed me that, no surprise, the separate etymologies have been discussed previously at Language Hat (2008), when Hat rapped Stephen Fry’s knuckles for assuming that the newer “meld” was a semantic drift rather than a new coinage.
On the other hand, considering that the card-game sense appears in the late 19th century and the “merge” sense in the early 20th, it seems to me that a semantic drift, or at least influence, from one to the other is possible, but I’d like to see a more careful investigation than Douglas Harper’s; he can’t be bothered to cite his sources (“said elsewhere”? “said to be”?) and gives no evidence that “The rise of the general sense of the word in English coincides with the craze for canasta”. You can do ngrams for “meld together, meld into, meld with”, which are almost certainly the new sense, but all of those don’t take off until the 1960s, whereas (Wikipedia says) the craze for canasta was in the 1950s.
I actually knew “meld” in the canasta sense before I ever encountered the “merge” sense, which is closely associated in my mind with Mr Spock. From what you say, it would appear that this a case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.
FWIW, Danish melde is what you do in bridge and whist when bidding for a contract, so the Mah Jongg meaning in English didn’t overly puzzle me until I remembered that it wasn’t used for the bridge sense.
Lots of Austrian dialects (/goʃːn/ f.). Locus classicus. (Full analysis of the song farther down the thread.)
I still have and cherish your copy of Švejk, hat!
I’m delighted to hear it!
Back when I was a card-carrying member of the Peeververein, Wilson Follett persuaded me that the sense ‘merge’ was a malapropism. I eventually abandoned that idea, but I do wonder if the now-standard etymology actually has any evidence in its favor. It seems plausible enough, but….
>Don’t have time or energy to investigate where “držte hubu” is on informality scale in Czech.
The phrase is rather abrasive, albeit it is in vous-form. I’d put it as “shut your mouth”.
I was searching for information on whether Karel Čapek was influenced by the golem legend when writing R.U.R. (answer seems to be something like ‘probably, but subconsciously’) ¹ , when I came across a paper titled “Golem, Robot, Švejk”. I was unaware of who that last one was, but after reading the WikiP article on him, it occurred to me that the three topics could be connected as follows:
• Golem – was created to labor obediently, but became destructive and has to be destroyed
• Robots – were also created to labor obediently, but destroyed humanity
• Švejk – labors obediently but destructively
The paper is in Czech, so those who know the language (or want to wrestle with Google Trans/DeepL more than I wanted to) can see if my idea is close to what it says.
_____________________________________________
1: If anyone has Čapek’s works, his comments on the topic are supposed to be in Divadelnikem proti své vuli, and Karel Capek Spisy 19. The original was in the Prager Tagblatt of 22 September 1935 — there is an online archive of that newspaper, but all of the year 1935 is missing. I read it in English here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43308245
Might be an allusion to his name: schweig “shut up” (but literary to archaic).
(Schweiger/Schwaiger “Tacitus” exists as a last name.)
Til Schweiger
Schweig stille, mein Herz, schweig still. Schumann, boring old-timey stuff.
Bontshe Shvayg.
A nice story, thanks.
It’s in Alexander Harkavy’s 1925 Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary:
(using the tsvey vovn and tsvey yudn in character map – transliterated as something like “shvyg”?)
שװײג
silence
שתיקה
Owlmirror, I think this is the key idea:
Popravdě se domnívám, že celou problematiku lze shrnout právě ve
jménu jména. Golem odpovídá době, v níž jméno bylo jménem božím.
Robot, a ne Švejk, jak by se mohlo zdát, odpovídá době, kdy jméno
bylo „humanisticky“ jménem člověka. Švejk odpovídá době, naší nebo
budoucí, v níž jméno už není jménem božím, ani jménem člověka, ale
my nevíme, zda je možné najít jméno nové, nebo znovu najít jedno
z předcházejících.
In fact, I believe that the whole issue can be summed up in the name of a name. The golem corresponds to a time in which the name was the name of God. Robot, and not Svejk, as one might think, corresponds to a time when the name was “humanism” the name of a man. Svejk corresponds to an era, ours or future, in which the name is no longer the name of God, nor the name of man, but we don’t know whether it is possible to find a new name or to find again one of the previous ones.
[DeepL, added mistakes are mine]
I wouldn’t spend too much time sweating it. The whole thing doesn’t hang together for me. If the author wants to investigate what makes Prague a unique place artistically, he should look much wider than Golem, robots, and Švejk.
That one probably got an extra lease of life because of Old Ludwig’s self-serving mic drop (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen).
self-serving mic drop
Well, he had been foreshadowing that shock denouement pretty heavily, in hindsight.
His act got more sophisticated latterly, though there are some still who reckon his old jokes were funnier.
Don’t get me wrong, it was a hell of a mic drop.
One can disagree with the man sine die but he had style.