The debate on Hungarian loanwords in Polish has been going on for many years and began in 1888 when I. Halász published the first part of his article entitled Magyar elemek az északi szláv nyelvekben [= Hungarian elements in the Northern Slavic languages] which dealt with Hungarian words found first and foremost in Slovak, but also in Czech and Polish lexicon. This early study, although written with good etymological intuition, bestowed very little attention to the borrowing routes of Hungarian words, in most cases simply enumerating their Slovak, Czech and Polish equivalents, but rarely attempting to elucidate their historical or phonetic backgrounds of the borrowing-mechanisms. Later on the same broad definition of Hungarism is observable in the works of such Polish scholars as L. Malinowski (1893) or even A. Brückner (1907, 1917a, b) where the lists of “Hungarian loanwords” contain practically all the words that Polish and Hungarian lexicon commonly possess (and obviously not being Slavic loans into Hungarian) regardless of the real donor language.

In subsequent years the question of borrowing channels was described in more detail, although they were not always fully appreciated in etymological research. A good illustration of this is A. Zaręba's article (1951), where the author mentioned the fact that the lexical material presented by him could be grouped according to the borrowing routes as well (Cf. Zaręba 1951: 123), but he completely neglected this criterion when discussing the loanwords. Moreover, he claimed that the majority of Hungarian loanwords in Polish were taken directly from Hungarian without any mediation (Zaręba 1951: loc. cit.).