It seems like most of our names for colors come from our German roots (blue/blau, green/grün, red/rot, etc.). But yellow is gelb in German, amarillo in Spanish, jaune in French, and giallo in Italian. I suppose the Italian seems closest, but perhaps they all have something in common?
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4Spanish amarillo is from Latin amarĕllus derived from amārus meaning “bitter”. Wiktionary hyphesizes that this may be because of the yellowish color of bile, which is bitter, but we don’t know for sure. – tchrist Aug 30 '13 at 18:48
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@tchrist As I noted in my answer, gall has the same "yellow" root/etymology, so that connection makes sense. The spanish suffix -illo is a diminutive, so amarillo literally means "a bit bitter". – ghoppe Aug 30 '13 at 20:19
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Fun fact: orange used to be called geoluread (yellowred). – Jon Purdy Aug 30 '13 at 23:21
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Also: gall bladder, jaundice. – Kaz Aug 31 '13 at 01:55
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@ghoppe That isn’t quite right. The Spanish word for bitter is amargo. It has with an extra g compared with the Latin amarus. So you would be thinking of something more like amarguillo. The reason there is no g there is because it didn’t happen that way, but rather came down to us from Latin amarellus without ever hitting amargo to get here. – tchrist Aug 31 '13 at 02:27
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The word for the colour yellow comes from a germanic root as well.
Old English geolu, geolwe, from Proto-Germanic *gelwaz (cf. Old Saxon, Old High German gelo, Middle Dutch ghele, Dutch geel, Middle High German gel, German gelb, Old Norse gulr, Swedish gul "yellow"), from PIE *ghel- "yellow, green" (see Chloe).
Palatalization is a sound change that took place from Old English to Modern English. Here's a short list of words where this shift took place: day (German Tag), yarn (German Garn), way (German Weg), year (Old English gear), nail (German Nagel), yield (Old English geldan, Old High German geltan) and thirsty (German durstig). It also happened with another colour word: gray (Old English græg.)
It should be noted that in Modern German, the terminal g has become devoiced and Tag sounds more like tuck in English.
The word is similar in Latin languages because they all share the same Proto-Indo-European root, *ghel-. It's interesting that this same root which had the meaning "to shine" gave us not only the colour yellow, but also gold, gild, gall (i.e. yellow-coloured bile), and a range of sparkly gl- words: glitter, gleam, glow, etc.
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10+1 and gestern => yesterday which is close to gelb => yellow. – Alain Pannetier Φ Aug 30 '13 at 19:33
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The forms "geluw" and "gelluw" for "yellow" are historically attested in Dutch but no longer in use; clearly German "gelb" and modern Dutch "geel" have developed from it. – reinierpost Aug 31 '13 at 12:27
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@reinierpost I took the germanic word from etymonline.com, I clarified in my post. I think the modern German word is gelten but the original meaning of "to pay" has gone down different paths in both German and English. – ghoppe Dec 11 '13 at 16:05
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Slightly inaccuracy: palatalisation happened before the stage of Old English. It is common to Anglo-Frisian (quoting from a possibly leaky memory, Old Frisian has for example such forms as dei ‘day’ and something like ief ‘gives’). Also, I’d say German Tag today sounds more like BrE ‘tark’ or AmE ‘tock’, rather than ‘tuck’ (in either). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 11 '13 at 20:15
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1Also (11 months later), grey is an interesting word, because there actually isn't any palatalisation in it. The OED spelling with a final g is purely orthographic, based on words like dæg, which proves that the palatalisation had already been completed by that time, and that written g in front-vowel environments simply represented /j/. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 16 '14 at 11:20
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It’s from the Germanic root gel which has produced both English yellow and German gelb (OED).
Barrie England
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2It depends how far back you want to go. The hypothetical Old Germanic root was gelwa and the hypothetical Indo-European was ghelwo. – Barrie England Sep 03 '13 at 07:23
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The point is that the -ow and -b weren't added onto the preexisting word. – reinierpost Sep 03 '13 at 09:18
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@reinierpost, perhaps not in Germanic as such, but going farther back, the root is indeed just *gʰel-. The w is part of the suffix, not part of the root; it is absent in other derivatives (see cognates in ghoppe’s answer). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 11 '13 at 20:19
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@Janus Bahs Jacquet: yes, but you don't need to go further back, and Barrie writes 'Germanic'. – reinierpost Dec 12 '13 at 08:38
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@reinier, obviously it's hard to tell where the distinguishing line between a root and a word lies in a reconstructed language; but I don't think it's that far-fetched to say that the root was thought of as *gel- in Germanic times, and that *-wa was still recognisably a suffix. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 12 '13 at 09:55
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I thought to supplement the other excellent answers with more information about the PIE root *ghel-.
This website lists more derivatives, but references p 29, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots by Calvert Watkins, on which the entry ghel-2 lists many more derivatives an so is too long to reproduce here; so I quote only the underlying semantic field:
to shine ine with derivatives referring to colors, bnght materials. gold (probably "yellow metal"). and bile or gall. (Oldest form *g
[There is a diacritic atop g, but I cannot see which diacritic it is from Google Books.]hel-.)