Esperanto · Chapter 20 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
Writing it down: orthography and punctuation
The comma before ke, capitals gathered in one place, k.t.p. and s-ro, the compound hyphen, and why no Esperanto punctuation rule is truly compulsory - plus the x-system for bare keyboards.
The short version
Capitals go on the place, not on the people
Names, places, countries, festivals and organisations take a capital: Francio, Parizo, Kristnasko. Peoples, national adjectives, weekdays, titles and derivatives do not: franco, franca, lundo, sinjoro Zamenhof, esperantisto. A language name built from a people-adjective is lower case, la angla, while one that is a noun in -o takes a capital, which is why Esperanto does. Months are the one genuinely contested cell: the Fundamento wrote Januaro, and almost everybody now writes januaro.
dimanĉon, la 5-a de majo, en Francio
ktp, s-ro, and the decimal comma
The working shorthand is short: ktp is kaj tiel plu (and so on), t.e. is tio estas, ekz. is ekzemple, bv. is bonvolu, n-ro is numero, and the titles are s-ro, s-ino, f-ino, d-ro. A full stop marks a word cut short, as in ekz. and prof., and never appears where a hyphen already stands in for the missing middle. Endings attach straight onto the abbreviation. The decimal separator is a comma, so pi is 3,14, and an ordinal in digits is la 5-a or la 5a, both fine.
s-ron, ges-roj, 3,14, la 5-a de majo
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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