kambabench/docs/ORTHOGRAPHY.md

# Kamba orthography and normalization

**Status: not yet written.** Roadmap item v0.1 requires examining real transcripts from the
candidate corpora first; the normalization rules themselves are v0.2+ work and must involve
native Kamba speakers before anything beyond `normalize.py` v0.1's language-agnostic base layer
is implemented.

This document will hold, once that work happens:

- the linguistic justification for any spelling variants the normalizer treats as equivalent
  (the kind of citation-backed reasoning a normalizer needs — not rules invented without native-
  speaker or literature support),
- documented accepted spelling variants and how they were identified,
- the relationship between this document and `normalize.py`'s `NORMALIZATION_CHANGELOG`, so every
  normalization version is traceable to the linguistic reasoning behind it, and
- open questions about dialect-specific spelling differences, if any are found.

See `kambabench/scoring/normalize.py` for the current (v0.1, base-only) implementation.