Referring to Mr Mirecki’s note in the last October 1995 issue of “Głos”, entitled “Bunzlau Means Bolesław”, I would like, on the basis of a fairly extensive knowledge of the historical material connected with our town, to point out that there are enough well-known, authentic documents that, when it comes to the history of Bolesławiec’s name, there is no need to consult secondary sources. The latter, moreover, often contain unverified and untrue information. This is certainly the case here. Bolesławiec was never called Bolesław, except for that brief period after the last war when, paradoxically, this happened because of precisely such secondary sources. All the old documents known to us, beginning with the first one from 1202, use, in various phonetic transcriptions, exclusively the name Bolesławiec. And this name, setting aside other aspects connected with it, is, precisely because of its sound, in itself proof that this locality, this town, has indisputably Polish roots and that it does not owe its origins, for example, to the Czechs, among whom there were localities called Bolesław. And this name, as Dr Wernicke says in his 1884 history of the town, “remained with minor variations (such as Boleslavec, Bolezlavech, Bolezlavitz) throughout the thirteenth century and underwent Latinisation into Boleslavia, poetically Bolesla” (p. 8). In subsequent centuries, this Latinised form of the name still appeared on seals, but always in the genitive, “civitatis boleslaviensis” (“of the town of Bolesławiec”). It must nevertheless be noted that, strictly speaking, the adjective “boleslaviensis” could correspond to a noun sounding either Bolesławiec or Bolesław, but it was of course already used in the earliest documents in connection with the indisputable form of the town’s name. Thus, when the town seal from 1353 bears the inscription around its edge, Sigilium burgensium Boleslav. civitatis, the abbreviated word “Boleslav.” contained there must above all be expanded into the form corresponding to the adjective in the genitive, Boleslaviensis, as can be seen on the aldermen’s seal from the same year, 1353, or on the seal from 1624. And there is truly no basis for concluding, on the basis of this adjective in our case, that the corresponding noun was Bolesław, as was undoubtedly incorrectly taught in the source cited in the article, a mistake repeated in other publications as well. The name of the town, preserved in a ceremonial, Latinised form and connected beyond any doubt with the earliest name, was accompanied by changes in everyday speech, resulting in the name Bunzlau. As Wernicke stated succinctly, leaving no etymological doubts in this regard, “the oldest form in which Bunzlau appears in an authentic document is Boleslavez” (p. 8) (emphasis by M.B.C.)
The Germans never gave this town the name Bunzlau. The name undoubtedly arose as a result of the influence of German phonetics on the word Bolesławiec. Over the years, the word lost its sonorous pronunciation, gradually undergoing not evolution but a garbled shortening. The fact that, for the increasingly numerous Germans arriving there, the word Bolesławiec was losing the meaning contained in it (the name Bolesław, the word—or concept—“fame”) certainly played an important role in this process. Phonetically foreign, pronounced without understanding its meaning, it eventually changed into the semantically empty cluster of sounds “bunclau”, which was essentially a garbled form of the word Bolesławiec, and after becoming established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it remained so thereafter. As such, in this shapeless form, the word Bunzlau simply means Bolesławiec.