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 proud member of the European Union
• here's a nice/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 main city 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: 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.

Name: Spelling

• in LaTeX: Mihai P\v{a}tra\c{s}cu.
• in HTML: Mihai Pătraşcu.
• in email, use plain Latin letters (Mihai Patrascu)

If you want to be pedantic:

• ă (\u{a}) is the official character, but ǎ (\v{a}) is acceptable, and looks nicer in LaTeX.
• ş (ş) should officially be ș (ș), but browsers usually mess this character up (after all, it was only introduced in Unicode in 1999!)
• as far as I know, ș does not even exist in LaTeX.

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 are like in most non-English languages (in English, think of "father" and "sure")