abbreviations for Unicode

[Dale Gerdemann <dale.gerdemann@googlemail.com>]

I've been editing files with lots of Unicode characters and I thought
I might save time by using abbreviations for certain hard to type
characters (I'm using Mule input methods for the easier stuff).
Everything works okay when I edit the .abbrev_defs file myself, but
the character encoding gets all screwed up when I let Emacs do the
editing. That is, if I use C-x a g to interactively define an
abbreviation, then this will work only for the current session. When I
quit, I'm prompted with the question whether I want to save
the .abbrev_defs file and if I say 'yes', then all the definitions I
have are destroyed.

I'm using GNU Emacs 22.2.1 on Ubuntu 8.10 with LANG=en_US.UTF-8

And btw, I'm mostly very happy with Unicode support in Emacs. My
problem here is really in the category of minor annoyances. But I
would like to fix it.