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bhle meant light coloured, blue, blond, or yellow. the root was reconstructed as *bhlē- rather than *bhleH-

Etymology of blue in English

The modern English word blue (German:blau) comes from the Middle English, bleu or blwe, which came from an Old French word bleu of Germanic origin (Frankish or possibly Old High German blao, "shining"). Bleu replaced Old English blaw. The root of these variations was the Proto-Germanic blæwaz, which was also the root of the Old Norse world bla and the modern Icelandic blár, and the Scandinavian word blå. It can also be green or orange occasionally(blue). A Scots and Scottish English word for "blue-grey" is blae, from the Middle English bla ("dark blue," from the Old English blæd). Ancient Greek lacked the word for colour blue and Homer called the colour of the sea 'Wine Coloured', except that the word kyanos was used for dark blue enamel.

As a curiosity, blue is thought to be cognate with blond and black through the Germanic word. Through a Proto-Indoeuropean root, it is also linked with Latin flavus ("yellow"; see flavescent and flavine), with Greek phalos (white), French blanc (white) (loaned from Old Frankish), and with Russian белый, belyi ("white," see beluga), and Welsh blawr (grey) all of which derive (according to the American Heritage Dictionary) from the Proto-Indo-European root *bhel- meaning "to shine, flash or burn", (more specifically the word bhle-was, which meant light coloured, blue, blond, or yellow), from whence came the names of various bright colours, and that of colour black from a derivation meaning "burnt" (other words derived from the root bhel- include bleach, bleak, blind, blink, blank, blush, blaze, flame, fulminate, flagrant and phlegm).

In the English language, blue may also refer to the feeling of sadness. "He was feeling blue". This is because blue was related to rain, or storms, and in Greek mythology, the god Zeus would make rain when he was sad (crying), and a storm when he was angry. Kyanos was a name used in Ancient Greek to refer to dark blue tile (In English it means blue-green)
 

Finnish kal-ja "beer", cf. Old English alu (West Saxon ealu), Old Norse ǫl "ale" (and a few other forms in Latin) pointing to a root *h₂el- "bitter"; Finnish lehti "leaf" i.e. *lekte-, cf. PIE *bhlh₁dh-, as in German Blatt "leaf", OE blæd "blade" (the semantics are no trouble, if interesting, and the truncation of the initial consonant cluster is standard for Finnish). An impressive case is Finnish teke- "do" which suggests the PIE root *dheh₁- "put, place" (but "do, make" in the western IE languages, e.g. the Germanic forms do, German tun, etc., and Latin faciō -- though OE dón and into Early Modern English still sometimes means "put", and still does in colloquial German). Here one might even think not of borrowing as such but as evidence for an ancestral Uralic-PIE linguistic unity. In other words, Finnish teke- might be inherited from a proto-language, not borrowed. (See Kortlandt.)

There are, however, problems with many of the forms cited as possible direct attestations of PIE laryngeals in Finnic. The "ale/beer" form is problematic. The "root" is securely attested only in western European languages, Germanic and Latin, and its form (in pre-laryngeal terms) seems to be *alu-, not *al-. Thus Lat. alūmen "alum", alūta "a kind of soft leather tanned with alum". The "beer" meaning is exclusively Germanic and the form there was *aluþ- (as seen in Old English ealu "ale" but genitive singular ealuþ < *alutos or the like). Baltic and Slavic forms are regarded as borrowings from Germanic, as Finnish olut "beer" obviously is. The connection of Finnish kalja to these facts is not impossible but is not easy. As for Finnish lehti "leaf", the underlying root is traditionally reconstructed as *bhel- seen in just a single form, *bhol-yo- "leaf" > Greek phúllon, Lat. folium. A secondary form, a so-called State II root, *bhl-eH- is entirely within the Indo-European canon; it has more apparent reflexes than the State I *bhel-, but again limited to Western Europe, the meanings all having to do with flowers and flowering (Lat. flōs, Eng. bloom (= German Blume), blow "to flower" (= Ger. blühen) and so on). The "leaf" form is limited to Germanic and was traditionally reconstructed as *bhlədh-. Such a reconstruction was possible when PIE *ə was conceived of as a vowel that was the residue of the reduction of a long vowel (as when the root was reconstructed as *bhlē- rather than *bhleH-). But such a syllable can no longer be countenanced in terms of any form of laryngeal theory, which would require that the *l be syllabic, and the outcome would have been very different (OE ¢bold OHG ¢bolt < PGmc *bul(H)daz < *bhḷHdh-; the symbol ¢ = "not attested because erroneous"). But even aside from the impossible shape required for the Finnic form, the details of the Germanic etymon itself are hard to see as anciently Proto-Indo-European.

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