Esperanto · Chapter 23 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
Johano, John or Gxon? Personal names
The three naming strategies and when the community uses each, PMEG's real answer to the accusative-on-foreign-names problem, Jocxjo and Manjo, and why our stories say Berta.
The short version
Three ways to say your own name
Esperanto offers three strategies for personal names: full assimilation with -o (Johano, Vilhelmo - what Zamenhof did), keeping the original spelling (what living people mostly do today), or phonetic respelling. The community convention: historical figures and classics get the -o form, your neighbour keeps her spelling. The Akademio ruled in 2013 that every Esperantist decides the form of their own name - possibly the most Esperanto ruling ever issued.
Kara Johano... sed: Kara Mary...
The accusative meets a foreign name
Mi renkontis Mary - where does the -n go? PMEG gives a ladder: vowel-final names can take -n directly (Annan), others take a hyphenated -on (Elisabeth-on), and you may simply drop the ending and let word order carry the meaning. That last option surprises learners, but it is PMEG saying it, not us.
Mi vidis Elisabeth-on. / Mi vidis Elisabeth.
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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