Thanks for the PR @yorickdowne, very cool! 🦏 This will be especially useful to have implemented as people need to generate their withdrawal keys when withdrawals become possible soon (tm).

Some things:

1. I made a PR against your branch with some minor tweaks + some testing here: https://github.com/yorickdowne/eth2.0-deposit-cli/pull/1
2. I am a little worried about how shortening words works in languages with non-Latin alphabets. These changes work well in English, etc but shortening words with word[:4] may not work in other alphabets. That said I can't find an instance of this being the case. (Because shortening Chinese, Korean, and Japanese with word[4] has no effect.) Things would break with Arabic though (maybe this is why there isn't an Arabic BIP39 word list?).
3. Agreed, NFKC is the reasonable choice here. 👍

4. "I am using a nested for list comprehension ..." Yeah, unfortunately, this looks to be the best solution here. My automagic language detection is pretty ugly to start and unfortunately it doesn't interact well with this PR. I'm not unhappy tho.

5. I am worried about my language detection getting confused due to multiple languages passing the checksum now that only 4 letters are used. A 12-word mnemonic only has 4 bits of error correction, so I wonder whether it is possible to have two languages pass the checksum-check when only 4 words are chosen.

1. Merged. Not sure the changes have the workflow for new-mnemonic, and I see you changed the instructions there. I'll take a look and add new-mnemonic abbreviation handling if it's not already in.
2. Shortening with word[:4] works for all test languages so far, because of the chosen NFKC. If a character uses two or more unicode characters for its representation, NFKC combines that into one character. Good question how this would work for Arabic. BIP-39 does not mandate four-letter abbreviations, but does cite them as part of an "ideal word list". I'd say cross this bridge if there are ever word lists that do not support abbreviations.
3. I share this worry. None of the examples in the tests conflict, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. I can think of five solutions.
   a) Trust that automatic language detection will continue to work with Spanish and Portuguese and won't have conflicting checksums - the only two word lists I am aware of that could even be detected in two languages, right now, when using abbreviations.
   b) If Spanish or Portuguese are detected, prompt the user to confirm the language before moving on. Allow them to select the correct language.
   b') The same but always prompt the user to confirm, do not have an opinion of which word lists may generate multiple answers.
   b'') Do not return immediately when a match is found. Store the result, and continue iterating through languages. If there are two or more valid results, display this to the user and ask them to choose the correct language
   c) Ditch automatic language detection

Of all these, I like b'') best. It addresses the issue narrowly while keeping the existing UX intact for the vast majority of cases - possibly even all cases.

1. Indeed, I should not have included the new-mnemonic instructions
2. Agreed, I think we're ok on this front.
3. Yeah, my gut feeling is that I could find a collision if I tried. Especially between the romance languages. I don't think it's common in normal usage, but we have hundreds of thousands of users and it's not cryptographically unlikely.
   • I'm not convinced b) is sufficient. There may be collisions between more of the languages. Also adding special cases is an anti-pattern.
   • Agreed that b'') seems like the best answer for now.
   • I'm personally for c) in the longer term. I think we should ask the user for their mnemonic language and then you predictive text to help the user enter words as they go.

I opened another PR (https://github.com/yorickdowne/eth2.0-deposit-cli/pull/2) against this branch to address the last few things I'd like to get done before merging this PR.

• Adds script test for existing_mnemonic
• Adds abbreviated words functionality to new_mnemonic (it was a 1-liner, lol)
• Adds script test for new_mnemonic
• Adds check that a mnemonic isn't valid in multiple languages in case abbreviated words were used.