The hungarian word gyenge ‘weak, feeble, powerless’ and its Slovak (Slavic) cognates

Šimon Ondruš’s wide scope of linguistic interests included the etymology of Hungarian words. In a ten-part series of articles published in the 2004 and 2005 issues of the journal Slovenské pohľady na literatúru, umenie a život, he published entries of varying lengths on the etymologies of more than a 100 Hungarian words, including proposed etymologies of some words of unknown origin. One such Hungarian word is gyenge ‘weak, feeble, powerless’, which, according to Ondruš, is of Slovak origin. In a rather short article, he points out some facts that he believes prove this relationship, but Ondruš did not write a detailed etymology. The present paper reviews Ondruš’s arguments as well as those that can be found in the Hungarian literature about the origin of this word.