Emacs Error: The encoding "nil" is not known

[* Tong *]

Hi,

I get:

 Starting new Ispell process [en_CA-wo_accents] ...
 ispell-init-process: Error: The encoding "nil" is not known. This could  
also mean that the file "/usr/lib/aspell/nil.cset" could not be opened 
for reading or does not exist.

Anybody knows how to fix this?

A bit background -- 
In order to override whatever my shell environment encoding is, I 
deliberately set 

 (setq ispell-dictionary "en_CA-wo_accents")

so that my emacs spell checking works no matter what. 

However, the trick ceased to work having updated emacs to v23.2+1-4; and
I need a fix.

Thanks

-- 
Tong (remove underscore(s) to reply)
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