Currently finishing up work on the EO translation of my comic Egg Story, which will be published in June, to be launched at the Kongreso de Esperantistoj en Kansajo in Osaka.

Working on the title page today. 'Rakonto de Ovo' (possibly 'Aventuro de Ovo' ) is my working title as yet, but from a design point of view it's a bit long. 'Ovo-rakonto' would fit on one line, but the hyphen is not quite my cup of tea.

My question, can I get away with 'Ovo Rakonto' for a book title, or is it likely to be too unconventional/flat out wrong and cause frowns?

Ovo rakonto is flat out wrong, you need the hyphen. A noun can't describe a noun in Esperanto.

Just an aside, and not to be rude, but this hyphen thing is a relatively basic question. I hope you have someone checking your Esperanto translation for grammar?

Maybe your Esperanto title could be simply, "Ovo". Kind of minimalist and cool, maybe.

Or else "Ovoj", there's more than one egg in the story, right?

erinja:Ovo rakonto is flat out wrong, you need the hyphen. A noun can't describe a noun in Esperanto.

I'd say that without the hyphen, but also without the space, it would be correct as well. "Ovorakonto", or even "Ovrakonto".

erinja:Or else "Ovoj", there's more than one egg in the story, right?

I suppose it's about this, so indeed about many eggs. I'd like the simple 'Ovoj'.

erinja:Ovo rakonto is flat out wrong, you need the hyphen. A noun can't describe a noun in Esperanto.

Just an aside, and not to be rude, but this hyphen thing is a relatively basic question. I hope you have someone checking your Esperanto translation for grammar?

Don't worry, it doesn't come across as rude. I should have been a bit clearer in my first post. I know it's wrong but was wondering if, in titling books in esperantujo, people have ever broken the rules for design reasons, or whether that is 'just not done'. I wouldn't hesitate to be unconventional/ungrammatical for an English book, if I thought it served the purposes of the book. (in fact, as an example, the title of the original book in English is all in lower-case, just for the sake of design.) For the EO version, as I said I may prefer the look of it without the hyphen, but wasn't sure if rules were commonly flouted in designing book covers, and wanted to make sure before I threw out this idea as an option. I had an inkling that that title might irk the average esperantist and thus effect their enjoyment of the book.

It's like a painting. It may be anatomically wrong but still somehow 'work', as they say. Design and grammar are different kettles of fish. However I don't know how people have done it in esperantujo, as I only have a dozen or so books here myself, not much of a sampling to know for sure.

The manuscript is being checked by 5 proofreaders with about 150 years of experience in Esperanto between them. However I couldn't ask them today as they are not here right now!

(By the way I did already consider the simple palindromic title and ovorakonto and a dozen odd others, but you needn't send your alternative suggestions.)

For a humorous title, what about OVenturoj

You could do a title in all lower case for the sake of design, but I wouldn't put in a grammatical error for the sake of design. It would be like writing "Ham burger" in English instead of "Hamburger". Or if you want to talk about erroneous punctuation, it would be like writing their's instead of theirs, or shes instead of she's. It just wouldn't be done.

The thing is, the world of Esperanto is so rife with grammatical errors that people would look at your title and their first thought would be "Whoops, he messed up the grammar", not "Oh, yes, it looks much better with no hyphen".

Maintenance of correct grammar is pretty important in Esperanto. We have a lot of learners and we want to give them a good model, and quite frankly, a lot of our relatively experienced speakers speak with errors, small grammatical points that they just never learned the rule for, or just don't care. People would assume your title was erroneous due to ignorance, not due to a design choice.

I heard a story from early in Esperanto. Someone was translating a play into Esperanto, with a character who spoke in bad grammar in the original. They didn't want to put actual bad grammar into the play, so I think they showed the character's defective speech in other ways - making him say things in redundant ways, using affixes together in unusual ways, etc.