Often in hip-hop songs recently I've been hearing that "nigger" derives from the Ethiopian term "negus" which used to mean emperor/king. I've been attempting to find evidence where this comes from for a project and was wondering if r/AskHistorians had any evidence of where the term derived from, because I have only found blog posts referencing this subject and nothing much that is credible.
I would love to be proved wrong here, but it is highly unlikely that "negus" is the source word for the"n-word". For one thing, the english spelling for ንጉስ(King) is very misleading. Even though it is spelled Negus, it is actually pronounced "neh-goose". But the main reason that I think the resembles between the two words is a coincidence is because there are alot of words in Amharic( one of the ethiopian languages that Negus is from) that sound like the n-word. ንገ(negge) means "tommorrow", ነጋ(negga) means "dawn" or "it has risen", ነገር(negger) means thing, and ንግስት(neggest) means "queen."
I hope this helped.
Source: I'm Ethiopian and speak Amharic.