Maybe, but my German-English dictionary tells me that the word for “plowman” is Pflüger, and Neger means Negro. (There is no listing for Negger.)
Well, apparently it rhymes with “tiger”:
That book is Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word by Randall Kennedy. Kennedy doesn’t have much to say about the etymology of the word, just noting that it is derived from the Latin niger, and citing the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang and the OED. Kennedy cites a usage of “negars” to describe a shipment of slaves in 1689 and lists a host of other variants. This passage (and footnote) is relevant to the OP:
Oops, that was 1619.
I recently had the opportunity to ask a guy from Ghana a question that had been kicking around in my head for a while: If you call people from Nigeria Nigerians, what do you call people from Niger? (pronounced Nye-jer?)
He said that you would call them Nigeriens (pronounced Nye-zhair-ee-ens)–a French pronunciation. He told me that its history as a French colony meant that you would generally pronounce things French-ish-ly. So, the country was generally called “Nee-zhair” among Ghanans. (According to him, “Nye-jer” is also a correct English pronunciation.)
Cite: some Ghanan guy I used to work with. 
Try it as Schwarzen / Egger. “Eggen” means to harrow or till.
That does make more sense; Schwarzenegger is harrowing.
:smack: Yes, you’re quite right.
[QUOTE=Rodgers01A professor wrote a brief history of the word a few years ago; I think it was just called “Nigger.” That might help, if you can’t find the answer elsewhere.[/QUOTE]
The complete title was Nigger: The Strange Case of a Controversial Word.
Heh heh. Welcome to the Straight Dope, Debuhdee. A simple, straightforward question and we’ve already got 28 posts on it, ranging from the pronunciation of geographical names to Proto-Indo-European linguistics to conflicting versions of a book title.
Of course, you’re a long-time lurker so you can take the heat. We’ve had real newbies in GQ burst out crying and run sobbing from the room when threads get like this. 
(And Eve: boooooooooo. :))
OK, hold it, I think I have an unsubstantiated idea…
When referring to “black”, the Latin word “niger”, by the rules of Latin, would be pronounced with the short-i and the hard-G. And well-educated Englishmen as of, say, the Enlightenment, would use it so in English.
Live languages, English included, change pronunciations and ortography. By the 16th century, in Spanish the word had become “negro”. In English it became a bunch of permutations of neger and niger.
Meanwhile, the initial suppliers of black slaves to the Brits were Portugese and Spanish traders, thus “Negro” and “Mulatto” become the “official” descriptors of a black and part-black person.
Now, and here’s the part I just pulled off thin air, What If both the mispronunciation of “negro” AND an archaic usage in the dialects of white folk in the American South, still using the “old English” pronunciation, converge into “ni-G’r” as the “vulgar” way to refer to “negroes”. By this time, English ortography has evolved to where to a speaker of Vernacular English unfamiliar with the background, “niger”* looks* like something to be pronounced “neye-jer” even if it weren’t. So writers start using two g’s, and soon everyone else picks up. The OED does not record "niger’ pronounced the wrong way, because, well, it never really was, it was just “lost” to disuse.
As for the river/country… the softening-of-the-g could be a phenomenon resulting from pronunciation changes among the western languages themselves. Some explorer in the 1500s writes about the Niger River, and folks keep reading about it for centuries without hearing it pronounced, eventually we just say it like it looks to us. In Spanish, for instance, for both river and country the “g” is pronounced as an h or soft ch’ as it would for a native-Spanish word.
With all due respect, I like to believe that if a Doper posted this question and was not black, they would not be warned, banned or in any way villified. We’re all about fighting ignorance, right? I’m straight, but believe I’m allowed to post G.Q.'s about other sexual preferences. I’m not sure anyone needed to calm down.
I hadn’t noticed the pronounciation of " Nyhee= jehhr " until I heard Anderson Cooper repeat it carefully and with exaggerated crappy faux French accent when he travelled there a few months ago to cover the famine occurring there. I’m 43, and when I was in school my teachers pronounced it " Nie-Jerr ".
In a rare mind-bending experience, I’ve been affectionately called “nigger” twice in my life, both times by black men who were happy to see me and were delivering hugs when calling me that. ( One was the rapper Ja Rule… ).
Cartooniverse, white Doper at large. 
This has been pretty well covered by now, but just to clarify: tdn posted that
I was saying that no evidence exists for this, just the opposite; the river’s name may have come from from niger meaning black. I said that because my edition of the OED makes no mention of the country or river at all. Obviously they’ve corrected that in later editions. However, if niger meaning a black person is dated to 1574 and Niger the river was not referred to until 1600 or later, an odd reversal is still in effect.
It’s also odd that Kennedy gives a 1619 date as the seeming first instance. Even my edition of the OED lists “Nigers” in 1574 and “Niger” in 1584; “neegers” in 1587; and “Neegars” in 1597.
JRDelirious, I’m afraid I can’t credit one iota of your speculations. They all sound wrong to me in every detail of history.
Cartooniverse, the pronunciation of Niger the country to the French pronunciation has just shifted in recent years, at least in U.S. public announcer-speak. In fact, there was a recent thread about this in GQ: Who changed the pronunciation of Niger?
At this point I would have to agree with this, based on the information from bibliophage, samclem, and what I found out, although based on samclem’s cite the original word would have been nigris, the adjectival form (I assume).
However, at the same time I would not discount the idea that the original form was the Taureg. It is unlikely any Roman actually reached the Niger itself. Juba most likely knew of the river through word of mouth. By the time the name reached Roman territory it could have become altered to a form which was familiar to Romans, especially if they assumed that it was in reference to a “land of the blacks.”
In fact, while I haven’t read the thread, I never heard it pronounced in the French until the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson thing.
Actually, according to Arnold, it translates as “black farmer”.
See posts #15 and 26.
Now you’ve gone and done it. You’ve written her name.
This could cost you your SDMB Security Clearance… :dubious:
And then there’s the elephant in the room, niggardly.
What was the first contemporary, post WWII song that included the word nigger?
I have no idea. My WAG would be ‘Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey’ from Sly & The Family Stone’s 1969 album stand - but there were probably a bunch of white folk singers who used the word earlier in that decade…
Not sure if it’s post WWII or if it would be regarded as “contemporary,” but Leadbelly’s Bourgeois Blues includes the following lines: