Demographics of Brazil but also other many indigenous Brazilian ethnic groups). Starting in the late 19th century, Brazil received substantial post-colonial immigration from several other regions, mainly from peoples of what are now the countries of Italy, Germany, Spain, Poland, as well as Arabic-speaking Christians from the Levant (mostly from what is now Lebanon, and less so from what is today Syria), Ukraine, Japan, the People's Republic of China and Korea. Jews in Brazil are a small but sizable population, and they include mostly Ashkenazi Jews (who also arrived with the post-colonial contingent of European migration), a smaller proportion of Sephardi Jews (mostly
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