Historical Issues With Xibe Language and Ethnonym
The name "Xibe" have been linked by some people with that of the ancient Xianbei. The modern expert on the Manchu people Pamela Kyle Crossley notes that if such a connection is indeed true, it would imply the Xianbei/Xibe undergoing a language shift from an either early Turkic or Proto-Mongolian language to a Tungusic one at some point in their history. They also note that such a putative connection encounters an obvious problem of explaining "many centuries intervening between the Xianbei and Sibo, during which there is virtually no evidence of a 'Sibo' people".
The same Manchurologist, P. Crossley, suggested that the Xibe "were well known to Russians moving toward the Pacific, who named Siberia after them". This, however, appears rather less likely than the standard derivation of the Russian Sibir (Siberia) from the name of Sibir Khanate and its capital Sibir. The latter names were well attested already in the mid-16th century (see, e.g., "Sibier Provincia" on Sigismund von Herberstein's map of Moscovia dated 1549, or the city and region of "Sibier" on Mercator's map of Asia (1595), while Russian explorers did not even reach today's Inner Mongolia until Ivan Petlin (1618), or the Amur basin, until Vassili Poyarkov (1643).
Read more about this topic: Xibe People
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