More strangeness on this topic:
Based on an idea I got here:
viewtopic.php?f=76&t=119308&p=529426#p529407
I decided to change the encoding of the file, to see if that would help with displaying those characters correctly. Instead of helping, it made it worse. I changed it to UTF-8 with BOM. Upon resaving, I got this error
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MasterScript.ahk
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Error at line 1783.
Line Text: cinema verite::cin? v?t?::cinemas verite::cin?s v?t?::cinema verites
Error: Hotstring max abbreviation length is 40.
The script was not reloaded; the old version will remain in effect.
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OK
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You can see in the message (and the screenshot that the abbreviation does not exceed 40 chars. Also notice that the error message indicates the wrong line number. The line number thing is not new though.. I've seen that before a few times with SciTE.
Anyway, I changed the encoding back to "Code Page Property" and now it saves correctly again.