How do you pronounce my name?

Since I am from Romania, my name, Mircea Paşoi, is very hard to pronounce for non-Romanian speakers. Consequently, I’ve put up this guide that hopefully will help people pronounce my name in English and write it correctly.

As a side note, thanks to Mihai Patrăşcu for the template.

Pronunciation

To start things off, here’s a pronunciation of my name by a Romanian robot voice. Not perfect, but better than what most people end us saying. :)

Here’s how to pronounce “Mircea”:

  • “mir” is more like “MIR space station” or “meer”
  • “cea” has a hidden “h” and is more like “cha” (as in “cha cha” the dance)
  • “r“ is trilled like in most Romance languages (e.g. Spanish)
  • “e” and “a” have their usual Latin readings - think of “lecture” and “father”

So, a somewhat correct pronunciation is “Meercha” (listen).

Paşoi is a bit easier:

  • “pa” is like in “park”
  • “ş” is like in “shoot”
  • “oi” is like in “oyster”

You can think of it like “Pashoy” (listen).

Spelling

Here’s how my name looks when it’s spelled correctly:

Mircea Pașoi

An interesting detail is that the Romanian language uses an S-comma character, being the only language where the comma is used as a diacritical. Unfortunately the S-comma character was only introduced in Unicode 3.0 and it looks bad in most fonts, so most Romanian names are written with an S-cedilla character instead.

Here’s a few ways to write it on your computer:

  • Text (with a cedilla, Unicode U+015F): Mircea Paşoi
  • Tehnically correct text (with a comma, Unicode U+0219): Mircea Pașoi
  • HTML (with a cedilla): Mircea Paşoi
  • HTML (with a comma): Mircea Pașoi
  • LaTeX: Mircea Pa\c{s}oi

If Unicode characters are an issues there’s always the simple plain letters spelling: Mircea Pasoi.

Meaning

According to Wikipedia, Mircea is a Romanian given name, a form of the South Slavic name Mirče (Мирче) that derives from the Slavic word mir, meaning peace. Numerous historical figures have had this name in the past (the most famous is Mircea the Elder), and it is still used today.

I couldn’t find any reference to what my last name means.