Jie People - Historiography

Historiography

Some historians conjecture the Jie to have been be a medieval tribe related to the modern Kets, living between the Ob and Yenisey rivers—the character 羯 (jié) is pronounced kit in Cantonese, ket or kiet in Hakka and katsu or ketsu in Japanese, implying that the ancient pronunciation may have been fairly close to Ket. Western Washington University historical linguist Edward Vajda spent a year in Siberia studying the Ket people and their language and his findings helped substantiated such conjecture into the origins of the Ket people, where DNA claims show genetic affinities with people of Tibetan, Burmese, and other origins . Edward Vajda further finds a relationship of the Ket language to that of Native American languages, and even suggests the tonal system of the Ket language is closer that that of Vietnamese than any of the native Siberian languages . His (2004) monograph Ket is the first modern scholarly grammar of the Ket language in English. (Lueders 2008)

Others link the Jie with the Sogdians, and suggest that the family name of Shi from Jie who ruled the Later Zhao state originated in the Sogdian statelet of Tashkent, which was later also known as the Kingdom of Shi. An Lushan, the Tang rebel general, had a Sogdian stepfather and was called a Jiehu. Yet others trace the Jie to those Great Yuezhi or Tocharians who had remained in Sogdiana.