Clarifying linguistic scope and responsibility of Text and Wording (with appendix)

Dear all,

Thank you for the substantial work on the Text and Wording
definitions.  For Western / alphabetic languages, this is well-structured
and technically sound work, and I understand the urgency of having
exploratory definitions ready for the upcoming WCAG 3 draft.

I would like to raise a clarification point about *scope and responsibility*,
not about the quality of the work itself.

The current draft definitions are clearly grounded in a Western /
alphabetic language model of text. They rely on concepts such as letters,
word boundaries, alphabetic abbreviations, and horizontal typographic
conventions. This is a reasonable and practical starting point, but it also
means that the document, as written, is not language-neutral.

Because of this, I believe it is important for the specification to
explicitly acknowledge that:

The current Text and Wording draft primarily reflects Western / alphabetic
language assumptions, and that addressing other writing systems is
additional work that remains within the responsibility of this subgroup.

Making this explicit does *not* reduce the responsibility of the Text and
Wording subgroup.  On the contrary, it ensures that support for
non-alphabetic languages is recognized as remaining normative work, rather
than being implicitly assumed to be already covered.

If this clarification is not stated, the document is likely to be read as
universally applicable, which will create serious confusion later for
implementers, evaluators, and national standardization bodies.

To make the issue concrete (without proposing solutions at this stage), I
have included a short appendix with examples showing where current
definitions rely on alphabetic-language assumptions.

Best regards,
MURATA Makoto
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Appendix: Examples of alphabetic-language assumptions (illustrative, not
exhaustive)

*Abbreviations and related concepts*
Many definitions assume the existence of letters, initials, or letter
counts.  In non-alphabetic writing systems, abbreviated forms are created
using different linguistic units, and the alphabetic model does not apply
directly.  For example, the abbriviation of 全国学力・学習状況調査 is 全国学調 (in
Japanese).

*Orthography*
The current definition implicitly assumes horizontal writing and alphabetic
typography.
In other writing systems, orthography includes features such as vertical
writing, annotation systems (ruby), and character-based line breaking,
which are outside the current model.

*Clear language / plain language*
The definition is based on vocabulary and sentence structure as primary
determinants of readability.
In other writing systems, readability is also strongly affected by script
choice, annotation, and typographic conventions, which are not covered
here.  For example, わたし and 私 (in Japanese).

*Numerical metadata*
The definition assumes a single numeric representation model.
In practice, many languages routinely use multiple numeric systems
depending on context, which does not fit this assumption.  (For example,
一万五千, 1万5千, and 15000 represent the same number.)

These examples are intended only to illustrate that the current draft is
alphabetic-language-specific in its assumptions, and that explicit scoping
is necessary to avoid misinterpretation.