Ashkenazi Jews from Jews who settled in the Iberian Peninsula, and Mizrahi Jews, who descend from Jews who remained in the Middle East. The name "Ashkenazi" derives from the biblical figure of Ashkenaz, the first son of Gomer, son of Japhet, son of Noah, and a Japhetic patriarch in the Table of Nations (). The name of Gomer has often been linked to the ethnonym Cimmerians. Biblical "Ashkenaz" is usually derived from Assyrian "Aškūza" (cuneiform "Aškuzai/Iškuzai"), a people who expelled the Cimmerians from the Armenian area of the Upper Euphrates, whose name is usually associated with the name of the Scythians. The
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