Esperanto Vocabulary - Proper Names

Proper Names

Proper names may either be translated into Esperanto (such as Johano for "John"), fully assimilated (respelled in the Esperanto alphabet and given the inflectional suffix o of nouns), partially assimilated (respelled only, as in Zamenhof or Kandaliza Rajs), or left in the original orthography. The latter usually only occurs for names or transliterations of names in Latin script. As noted under Gender, feminine personal names may take the suffix a rather than o even when fully assimilated.

When a name is fully assimilated, the final vowel is often changed to inflectional o, rather than the o being added to the full root. As with borrowed common nouns, this may be criticized if the vowel is part of the root rather than inflectional in the source language, as the resulting form may not be readily recognized by native speakers of the source language. However, it is a common phenomenon in inflectional languages such as Russian or Latin. If a name is not fully assimilated, the accusative case may be tacked on with a hyphen, as -n if the name ends in a vowel, or as -on if it does not (Zamenhof-on).