Spanish and Portuguese Jews location of the biblical Sepharad is disputed, but Sepharad was identified by later Jews as Hispania, that is, the Iberian Peninsula. Sepharad still means "Spain" in modern Hebrew. The relationship between Sephardi-descended communities is illustrated in the following diagram: "Sephardim" properly refers to all Jews whose families have extended histories in Spain and Portugal, in contrast to Ashkenazi Jews and all other Jewish ethnic divisions. However, Mizrahi Jews, who have extended histories in the Greater Middle East and North Africa, are often called "Sephardim" more broadly in colloquial and religious parlance due to similar styles of liturgy and a certain
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