Hunspell and contractions with apostrophes

[Eric Abrahamsen]

I've battled with this for years now: Hunspell marks any contraction
with an apostrophe (eg the "I've" that starts this sentence) as
misspelled.

It used to be that I could edit /usr/share/hunspell/en_US.aff and add
the apostrophe to WORDCHARS (and also "ICONV ’ '"), and that would do
it. Until the next time the hunspell package updated, and over-wrote its
config files (I'm running Arch linux), and I would have to do it again.

As of six months or a year or so ago, that trick no longer works. I add
the apostrophe to the above-mentioned file, and to
"/usr/share/myspell/dicts/en_US.aff", but it has no effect.

I've got this in my init:

(set-language-environment "utf-8")

And my shell $LANG variable is en_US.UTF-8. The
"/usr/share/myspell/dicts" directory contains *.aff and *.dic files for
all the en_* variants.

I don't know what else to edit! I'm sort of amazed that this problem is
so persistent, and so difficult to fix.

Any pointers very welcome!

Eric