Etymology
The only words that look like Livy in the Latin dictionary are a set related to English livid: livere, "be blue"; livor, "blueness"; lividus, "blue", livesco, "grow blue" and so on. Accordingly it has been proposed that Livius and the Gallic name Livo mean "blue." This derivation had been taken so much for granted that biological nomenclaturists named the common pigeon Columba livia with a supposed meaning of "blue pigeon." The root would be Indo-European *sli-, "blue", in the stem *sli-wo-, with the *s- dropping away in only Celtic and Latin.
There was not, however, a Latin adjective, *livius, "blue." The dictionaries now generally give livor as the source of neo-Latin livius. Moreover, lividus has a -d- too many and Livo has no -i-; that is, Livius does not fit the "blue" derivation. The linguist, Julius Pokorny, therefore hypothesizes "aber lat. Livius vielleicht etrusk.", "but Latin Livius is perhaps Etruscan. Certainly, no stories of any legendary men named blue exist.
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