The claim that family names such as "''Boyer'', ''Bowyer'', ''Baier'', and ''Boiar'' (among other variants throughout history) reflect descent from the Boii"<ref>This claim has been repeatedly published within this article, and has subsequently been removed to the above section on ''Modern misconceptions''.</ref>, as to some degree stated on the following webpage [http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~boyerlinks/boyer_orwigsburg/boyer_origins.html#_edn1], is historically unsustainable - first and foremost because there is not the slightest evidence in favour of any kind of continuity of family names between Antiquity and the Late Middle Ages [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_names#History]. Modern French, English, or German family names do not normally date back to a time before the High Middle Ages.<ref>The names in questions are much more convincingly explained as "cow-herder" (Boyer < bouvier)[http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer], "bow-maker" (Bowyer - parallel formation to "lawyer")[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowyer_%28surname%29], and "person from Bavaria" (Baier/Bayer). Feeble phonological parallels do not automatically prove etymological descent, even less so genetic.</ref>
==Boy==
A rather adventurous etymology for the English noun ''boy'' (male child) suggests that the name of the Boii may have suffered the same fate as the name of the [[Slavs]] in later times: as many of them were undoubtedly sold as slaves after their defeats in northern Italy, the term ''boius'' became another word for a slave. This semantic shift is well attested for the transformation [[Slav]] (speaker of a Slavonic language) > [[slave]] (servant), but ''boius'' is not attested with the meaning "slave" in Latin. (Latin ''boia'' = "restraint collar" is homonymic with ''Boia'' = "Boian woman" but probably not etymologically related to the ethnonym.<ref>Langenscheidts Handwörterbuch ''Lateinisch-Deutsch'', p. 79. If an etymological relation is to be considered, it would have to be in the sense of an adjective ''boia'' = "Boian shackles/restraint collar". Celtic iron collars have been found at sacrificial sites.</ref>) Descendants of the word ''Boius'' are not found in any modern descendants of the ancient [[Suebians|Suebic]] (Germanic) tribes north of the Alps (such as [http://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houptsyte Alemannic] or [http://bar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptsaitn Bavarian]), who would have been the most likely to borrow such a term from Latin (if they had already adopted it earlier, directly from Celtic, the ''o'' would have been opened to an ''a''). It is much more likely that the English ''boy'' is related to the German ''bube'', [[Middle_High_German|MHG]] ''buobe'', whose second labial makes it extremely unlikely that the word might be derived from the name of the Boii.
