About My Name and Origin

Where I'm From

I come from Romania. Basic facts:

• culturally, we're at the intersection of the Latin and Balkan (Eastern European) traditions.
• we're a member of the European Union.
• here's an amusing video about why Romania matters.
• we speak Romanian, a Romance language close to Italian or Spanish, except for the pronunciation (which is somewhat like Portughese).

Inside Romania, I come from Craiova, the capital of the province of Oltenia. In Romania, oltenii are renouned for being smart and energetic, but also being arrogant, speaking too fast, and having quick tempers.

Name: Spelling

The ideal graphical representation of my name is:

Note that the sign on top of the "a" is rounded, and the sign beneath the "s" is a comma (not a cedilla). That said, here's what you should do on current computer environments:

• in email and other media that might have trouble with Unicode, use plain Latin letters: Mihai Patrascu.
• in LaTeX, use: Mihai P\v{a}tra\c{s}cu. I don't think "comma-s" exists in LaTeX, so this uses a cedilla instead. The hat on top of "a" is a v, because I find the LaTeX \u{a} ugly.
• in HTML, use: Mihai Pătraşcu (for now). This is rendered as "Mihai Pătraşcu" by your browser, and it also uses "cedilla-s" instead of "commas-s".
• the proper HTML/Unicode characters are: Mihai Pătrașcu, which is rendered as "Mihai Pătrașcu" by your browser. As of 2008, the "comma-s" looks ugly on most browsers. When fonts improve, I will switch to using this proper spelling.

Note for Romanians: For typing Romanian in Windows, I strongly recommend the ErgoRomanian keyboard layout, which is very intuitive and significantly easier to use than the standard Romanian keyboards. By the way, I find it ridiculous that some people still insist on typing without diacritics.

Name: Pronounciation

Mihai is pronounced like the English words "me" + "hi!". To get it completely right:

• the vowel in "me" should be short
• there should be a stress on "hi"

In the middle of an English sentence, I often get these details wrong myself.

I you can read Cyrillic, Pătraşcu is Пэтрашку. Even if you don't know Cyrillic, it's not too hard to pronounce:

• ă is like in "above"
• ş is like in "shoot"
• r is trilled like in most Romance languages (e.g. Spanish)
• a and u have the usual Latin readings (in English, think of "father" and "sure")

Name: Meaning

• Mihai is the Romanian version of Michael (an archangel in Christian belief)
• Pătraşcu doesn't have any particular meaning in today's language.
• Mihai Pătraşcu (a.k.a. Michael the Brave) was a ruler of Romania around 1600. He's one of the most respected historical figures. He also came from my hometown, Craiova.