novembro

The twelfth month page, and the set is closed. This one deserves the ceremony. Januaro, februaro, marto, aprilo, majo, junio, julio, aŭgusto, septembro, oktobro and decembro all arrived before it, scattered across ranks 1,137 to 2,019 in an order that has nothing to do with the calendar and everything to do with how often people write each name down. Novembro came last, at rank 2,287, and with it the Esperanto calendar on this site is complete: twelve months, twelve pages, no gaps.

It is worth pausing on how arbitrary the order was. Marto came first at 1,137 - March gets written about more than any other month, probably because so much begins in it - and novembro came last by a distance. The frequency list is a picture of what people talk about, not of anything structural, and a set as tidy as the months arriving over eleven hundred ranks of separation is the clearest demonstration of that you will get.

Lower case, always - with one honest caveat. Month names are ordinary nouns in Esperanto, so en novembro, never en Novembro. That is the convention this site follows and the one modern usage has overwhelmingly settled on. It is also the one cell of Esperanto capitalisation where the language has genuinely not agreed: the Fundamento and Zamenhof himself wrote Januaro, Februaro, Majo with capitals, and PMEG still recommends the capital on the grounds that a month name is a proper noun like any other, while noting that almost nobody now writes it that way. So write novembro and recognise Novembro without blinking. The orthography and punctuation article sets the whole capitalisation table out, including the weekdays and language names that trip English speakers in the same way.

The accusative of time is the grammar to take from this page. A date takes -n with no preposition at all, because the accusative marks time-when as well as direct objects: la dekan de novembro - on the tenth of November. Add a weekday and it takes the ending too: merkredon la dekan de novembro. For the month as a whole period you use en and no accusative - en novembro - and for duration you go back to the accusative, du monatojn. Three constructions, one ending, and the rule underneath is that -n can always replace a preposition where no ambiguity results. The time expressions article works through the rest.