Limitations

• Each prepare() call processes one selected language.

• Language detection and mixed-language segmentation are external.

• SSMD and other markup must be parsed before calling spokenform.

• Date, time, currency, ordinal, and locale grammar is intentionally conservative.

• Invalid calendar dates and times remain literal; ambiguous standalone versions, phone-like strings without context, and generic serials remain protected or downstream-owned rather than being partially rewritten.

• Protected spans use allocated private-use sentinels that are checked against the current input, so existing private-use characters are preserved literally.

• abbr2words accepts POS annotations, but its bundled registries do not necessarily require POS labels. spaCy therefore does not necessarily alter default output.

• German quantity recognition depends on the released abbr2words structured match API. spokenform owns the semantic grammar, not the symbol inventory.

• English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Swedish, Vietnamese, and Chinese have explicit runtime structured policies. Japanese, Korean, Russian, Swedish, Vietnamese, and Chinese runtime support is covered by focused regression tests, but it does not imply kokorog2p or PolyNorm parity.

• Numeralform is the released renderer for non-Chinese numbers; Chinese uses released cn2an. Generic zh is conservative, while Mainland reviewed terminology and RMB live under exact zh_CN. hi, hy, and mn have renderer availability but remain outside automatic plain-number ownership until reviewed. zh_TW and zh_HK are not claimed.

• Swedish uses comma decimals, space/NBSP/NNBSP grouping, reviewed quantities, temperatures, and SEK currency grammar. Numeric dates and digital times are caller-managed but protected from generic rewriting; arbitrary initialisms and unreviewed specialist domains fail closed instead of borrowing English vocabulary.

• Vietnamese runtime support covers reviewed plain-number punctuation, exact decimal precision, canonical quantities, temperatures, VND/₫ amounts, and dependency-backed guarded abbreviations. Vietnamese dates, digital times, ordinals, arbitrary initialisms, and unreviewed specialist semantic domains remain caller-managed or fail closed.

• Thai runtime support covers point-decimal numbers, comma or space-family grouping, Thai and Latin digits, reviewed quantities and temperatures, exact THB/฿ amounts, and guarded Thai abbreviations. Thai ordinals are not enabled; dates, eras, and digital times remain caller-managed; unreviewed specialist sequence and range semantics remain literal or fail closed without English fallback.

• Russian runtime support covers ordinary cardinals, comma decimals, reviewed canonical quantities and temperatures, and nominative numeral-government forms. It does not infer arbitrary surrounding grammatical case. Numeric dates, digital times, year abbreviations, currency including RUB, phone-number speech, arbitrary initialisms, and unreviewed specialist semantic domains remain caller-managed or fail closed. Unknown future Russian abbr2words canonical unit IDs are preserved until a Spokenform grammar entry is reviewed.

• jp and cn are compatibility aliases for ja and zh_CN; kr is intentionally rejected. Unknown CJK-adjacent Latin identifiers remain unchanged, and ambiguous date formats remain unclaimed.

• CJK date/time and semantic renderers use reviewed native forms. Unsupported phone, ISBN, reference, legal, music, biology, geography, sports, chemistry, and math constructions decline rather than borrowing English words. Spanish explicit AM/PM forms use a 12-hour conversational branch, while unqualified 24-hour forms retain their written hour/minute values in speech. English owns a conservative contextual single-dot release-label rule (bot 2.0 -> bot two point oh) in addition to ordinary decimals. It does not apply oh globally: ordinary decimal zeros remain digit-wise, quantities take precedence, and years, suffix ordinals, Roman numerals, phone/ID sequences, arbitrary multi-dot versions, numeric suffixes, and phoneme-sensitive helpers remain reserved for kokorog2p.

• French decimal money is decomposed deterministically into major and minor units; reviewed fixtures define spelling and preserve written fractional precision rather than delegating to a third-party currency string.

• Spanish decimal quantities and money are decomposed deterministically from written fractional digits; reviewed fixtures define major/minor wording and Spanish one-ending agreement rather than delegating grammar to Numeralform.

High-confidence structured sequences include slash and Unicode fractions, coordinates, ISBNs, UUIDs, IPv4, MAC addresses, IBANs, locale-grouped phones, versions, hashtags, mentions, conservative chemical formulas, explicit acronym policies, labeled serial/VIN/product codes, legal references, sports scores, address components, operator-shaped math, music-context tokens, and controlled genus/species names. URL, e-mail, version, and contextual Roman promotion is opt-in through normalize_literals; caller protection remains absolute. Broad natural-language address, legal, mathematical, musical, and biological parsing remains outside the core contract. Unlabeled ambiguous alphanumeric strings remain unchanged rather than being memorized as product codes.

Benchmark profiles do not change that boundary: default is the release-safe contract, extended is an opt-in diagnostic profile, and an aggressive caller experiment is not a release gate. Compare only compatible report identities; questionable upstream targets remain quarantined and visible rather than being used to justify a normalization rule. See benchmarks/OWNERSHIP.md.

Limitations and readiness gates

spokenform is a one-language written-to-spoken layer. Callers own language selection, mixed-language segmentation, markup/SSML, tokenization, lexicons, phonemization, and model-specific punctuation.

German was the first kokorog2p parity target. English has a direct spokenform API parity contract; French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese now have text, source mapping, downstream token/phoneme, protection, and released-stack fixtures. Portuguese and Czech time remain caller-managed. Czech and English semantic number categories are owned by spokenform, and English is active on the kokorog2p spokenform adapter for reviewed structured semantics, contextual single-dot release labels, and safe ordinary-number categories. English phoneme-sensitive years, suffix ordinals, Roman numerals, phone/ID and arbitrary multi-dot sequences, numeric suffixes, and G2P decisions remain downstream-owned. Unsupported language categories use an explicit NumberPolicy.NONE warning rather than an automatic plain-cardinal ownership decision.

Use PreparationConfig.for_kokorog2p(language) for a profile that keeps all run boundary whitespace caller-owned, enables exact protection/mapping, and makes number ownership visible. model_punctuation only records that punctuation stays downstream; spokenform does not rewrite model punctuation. Do not remove a downstream normalizer until a dual-run comparison covers text, source offsets, token boundaries, phonemes, protected overrides, and warnings.