Encoding problems (input and output) with UTF8 encoding/locale

Sorry, I meant "<email address hidden>" with a dash before the 8 ...

The attached screenshot contains what is apparently supposed to be the Finnish word "järjestelmä". This type of mojibake is typical for applications which are hardcoded to use Latin-1.

Is this symptom still reproducible in 8.10?

Not this particular symptom, because it seems that all the ISO-8859-1 words in the dictionary are simply skipped.

I played five rounds and did not get a single word with ä or ö in it. Statistically speaking, a bit over 10% of the words in the file words.fin contain a character outside the range a-z (that's 59/486 to be precise, excluding the first line of the file which is just a label) so after seeing a few hundred words, I started to recognize many of them as repeats, but none that had the umlaut vowels (in Finnish, there are not technically umlauts, but you know which I mean).

This is a freshly installed Intrepid amd64 installation, with LANG=en_US.UTF-8 but Finnish keyboard preferences. I also tried LC_ALL=C and LC_ALL=fi_FI.UTF-8 (after installing the Finnish locale via System > Administration > Language Support) to no avail. It won't let me use fi_FI.ISO-8859-1 or fi.ISO-8859-1 or fi_FI.ISO-8859-15 although they're in /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED but this is probably a locale problem (see below; notice the error messages from locale).

Also I can't seem to strace the program.

bash$ grep ^fi /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED
fi_FI.UTF-8 UTF-8
fi_FI ISO-8859-1
fi_FI@euro ISO-8859-15
fil_PH UTF-8

bash$ LC_ALL=fi_FI.UTF-8 locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="fi_FI.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=fi_FI.UTF-8

vnix$ LC_ALL=fi_FI.ISO-8859-1 locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="fi_FI.ISO-8859-1"
LC_NUMERIC="fi_FI.ISO-8859-1"
LC_TIME="fi_FI.ISO-8859-1"
LC_COLLATE="fi_FI.ISO-8859-1"
LC_MONETARY="fi_FI.ISO-8859-1"
LC_MESSAGES="fi_FI.ISO-8859-1"
LC_PAPER="fi_FI.ISO-8859-1"
LC_NAME="fi_FI.ISO-8859-1"
LC_ADDRESS="fi_FI.ISO-8859-1"
LC_TELEPHONE="fi_FI.ISO-8859-1"
LC_MEASUREMENT="fi_FI.ISO-8859-1"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="fi_FI.ISO-8859-1"
LC_ALL=fi_FI.ISO-8859-1

vnix$ <email address hidden> locale
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_MESSAGES to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
<email address hidden>"
<email address hidden>"
<email address hidden>"
<email address hidden>"
<email address hidden>"
<email address hidden>"
<email address hidden>"
<email address hidden>"
<email address hidden>"
<email address hidden>"
<email address hidden>"
<email address hidden>"
<email address hidden>

vnix$ <email address hidden> typespeed
typespeed: main: setlocale

Oh and also for the record, typing those keys produces weird mojibake in the input field as before (looks like some escape sequence, like [?? where the ? are the Unicode "unknown character" glyph, a question mark on top of a solid ball, like in the screenshot I posted earlier).

I confirm this, using de_DE.UTF-8.

Typing "ü" adds "MM-<" to the input box, "ß" becomes "M~" etc.

Also strings in the menu are displayed wrong, if they contain an umlaut:
 4. PunktestM-CM-$nde anzeigen

"msgunfmt /usr/share/locale/de_DE/LC_MESSAGES/typespeed.mo" appears to display the strings properly as utf8.

Maybe typespeed sets up internal conversation in a wrong way?

I can make it fail on startup using the following - while the specified locale setting is invalid / not installed though:
$ LANG=de_DE.latin1 typespeed
typespeed: main: setlocale