kapitalo

The head is genuinely in there, and it still does not decompose. Latin caput is a head. Capitalis means of the head and therefore chief, principal, and the principal sum of a loan became capitale, the money the interest is calculated on. So the seam is real in Latin, and kapo at rank 135 comes from that same caput.

The kapitulaci page told this story from the other end, and it ends the same way: kapital- is one indivisible borrowed root under Rule 15. There is no Esperanto rule that gets you from a head to a bank balance, and kap- plus anything will not build it. The history is genuine and the grammar is not, which is the whole lesson of this chapter.

The cognate that proves the point is cattle. Latin capitale also meant movable property, which for most of human history meant livestock counted by the head, and English got both cattle and chattel out of it. Same root, same head-counting, three very different words.

Three English "capitals", three different Esperanto words. This is the practical value of the page:

• kapitalo - capital in the financial sense, money and assets put to work.
• ĉefurbo - a capital city, literally chief-town.
• majusklo - a capital letter. (Granda litero will be understood everywhere, and is what most people say.)

Reaching for kapitalo in the second or third of those is a straight English interference error, and one that produces a sentence which still parses.

Derived forms. Kapitalismo is capitalism, kapitalisto a capitalist, and kapitaligi is to capitalise in the accounting sense. The -ism- and -ist- are doing their ordinary work on top of a root that does not itself come apart.