No, Arnold, because it would be spelled Nijer, the way the modern "sanitized" packaging for niger seed goes. In some ways things have become ridiculous. I heard the story of a speaker at a local gardening group who, being of eastern European origin, pronounced Helleborus niger with the short i sound and the hard g sound. Perfect textbook Latin, but some hypersensitive soul in the audience took offense. What ever happened to "it's just a word"? Jim McKenney