My wife predicts that...

[olger]

I bought some asphalt roof coating in early 2005 and it said negro on the label - meaning black. It was imported material, and worked fairly well too.

[Planey]

Is it possible that the name of the country "Niger" (and its eponymous river) derives also from the Latin or Spanish or Portuguese word for black?

I don't know, just wondering...

Graeme

[Planey]

I have done some more research (from Wikipedia - highly authoritative?):

• A good possibility for a source is the Tuareg phrase gher n gheren "river of rivers", shortened to ngher, a local name used along the middle reaches of the river around Timbuktu.

  It is often assumed, without evidence, that Niger derives from the Latin word for "black", niger, but it would have been more likely for the Portuguese explorers who first wrote this name on their maps to have used the Portuguese word, negro, as they did elsewhere in the world. In any case the Niger is not a blackwater river, which was the motivation for all other rivers that were called black. (See Rio Negro.) Some have rationalized that 'black' may have referred to the color of the people living on the river, but this did not happen to any other river in Africa. Therefore it would seem that the similarity between the name Niger and the Latin word niger is either coincidence, or that knowledge of Latin influenced the spelling of an indigenous name like ngher.

So it looks like I was incorrect in my guess.

Graeme

[David Koot]

Good point, and you probably are correct. European explorers/traders certainly did assign descriptive place-names. Fascinating history.

Dave