White Africans of European ancestry White Africans of European ancestry White Africans of European ancestry are Africans descended from any of the white ethnic groups originating on the European continent. In 1989, there were an estimated 5.6 million white people with European ancestry on the African continent. Most are of Dutch, British, Portuguese, German, French, and to a lesser extent, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Russians, Jewish (Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews) or Irish descent. The majority once lived along the Mediterranean coast, in South Africa, or in Zimbabwe. The earliest permanent European communities in Africa were formed at the Cape of Good Hope; Luanda, in Angola;
Sephardi Hebrew of Hebrew in Mishnaic times (1st-2nd centuries), with the Sephardi pronunciation being derived from Judaean and the Ashkenazi from Galilean. The theory is supported by the fact that Ashkenazi Hebrew, like Samaritan Hebrew, has lost the distinct sounds of many of the guttural letters, and there are references in the Talmud to that as a feature of Galilean speech. Idelsohn ascribes the Ashkenazi (and, on his theory, Galilean) pronunciation of qamats gadol as to the influence of Phoenician: see Canaanite shift. During the Masoretes (8th-10th centuries), there were three distinct notations for denoting vowels and other details of pronunciation in