Are mnemonic seeds possible in right-to-left languages?

Question

For Electrum-style mnemonic seeds, words start with a unique prefix, usually the first 3 or 4 letters, so that users can change the rest of the word. But what would happen with languages that are written from right to left, like Arabic, Persian and Hebrew? Would the code expect the end of the word to be unique? And would it be difficult to change the system to accommodate right-to-left scripts?

At the moment, the GUI has been translated into Arabic and Hebrew, but we don't have any word lists for mnemonic seeds in right-to-left languages.

Answer 1

It'd be interesting to see if it displays correctly, but the system should be the same. In RTL languages, the display is different, the ordering of letters or glyphs is not changed. The first glyph in a string is just displayed at the rightmost position, instead of the leftmost position. You would therefore have prefixes like in English.

Answer 2

Whether the language is RTL or LTR isn't really the issue. For example, if we take two words "hello" and "world", the first few letters uniquely identify each word. Even if you reversed the words letter-wise they are still uniquely identifiable.

To develop a new language wordlist you'd just need to ensure that each word, however it's laid out, the first few characters (taken LTR) uniquely identify the word. "hello", "olleh", "world", "dlrow" as an example.