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Reversing text -- how do different cultures and languages approach this?

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In computer science, there's a "basic problem" called string reversal. You take a piece of text, and flip it so it reads backwards. "abcd" becomes "dcba", etc. There's also the question of plaindromes -- "hannah" is a name that reads the same both ways if it is flipped in the middle.

However with Unicode this becomes difficult, because suddenly rather than having to deal with just western languages like English (Which I assume to be uniform in this regard -- but I could be incorrect!), you also have to deal with Arabic, Sumarian, any language that Unicode supports.

So my question is: Has this question been studied and what assumptions about reversing pieces of text like this can be made, and what assumptions made in the context of English are likely to be wrong?

For example, maybe in some languages with diatrics, the correct approach is to flip the diatric to the other side of the character, or keep it in the same position. Maybe some languages/cultures have never thought of palindromes, etc.


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