Lukoševičius, Mantas Lukoševičius.
Contrary to popular belief, my name is possible to pronounce and even learn. Here is some help for one so inclined.
“Mantas” is easy anyway.
Pronunciation
is pretty straightforward if you don’t rush it.
Syllables and accents: Man·tas Lu·ko·še·vi·čius.
š=sh, č=ch, both accentuated vowels a and e are open and long, iu≈ü.
An official source recommends accentuation Man·tas, though it’s less common.
Phonetic transcriptions:
- Phonetic Alphabet: /ˈmaːntas ˌlukoˈʃæːvitʃys/
- English: /mahn·tas lu·ko·sheh·vih·chus/
- German: /mahn·tas lu·ko·sche·vi·tschüss/
A free Lithuanian voice synthesizer does a reasonable job:
Typing
With most modern software copy-pasting the name will work just fine, thanks to Unicode.
Character details: Mantas Lukoševičius
LaTeX accents: Mantas Luko\v{s}evi\v{c}ius
Many flexible systems (like search engines) or people (like me) will accommodate the lack of diacritics – “mantas lukosevicius” – matching it with the correct spelling. ASCII-only spelling is sometimes unavoidable, like in an e-mail address.
By the way, you can see our research on automatic restoration of diacritics here.
Origins
Given name Mantas is of Baltic Old Prussian origin.
Surname Lukoševičius originates from the name Luke and has a patronymic construction (common in many languages) layered by several cultures, reflecting the long and complicated history of Lithuania. Correspondingly long and complicated surnames were considered cool (i.e., noble) at the time.
Lithuanian is said to be one of the most conservative living languages, closest to the Indo-European root.
Ubiquity
While they may sound exotic, both Mantas, Lukoševičius, and even the exact full name are relatively common among Lithuanians: Facebook knew ~50 of us, last time I checked. Chances are it’s not me ;).