Comment 2 for bug 578917

I don't understand you headline but I had the exact same type of error I believe it's related to myspell en_ZA.

I solved it by removing myspell-en-ZA and openoffice.org-l10n-en-za (don't know the oo part has any influence)

In my case it came when starting gedit from the commandline:

gedit textfile.txt

I did a

strace -o "outfile.txt" gedit textfile.txt

Which clearly indicated myspell en_ZA was the problem

Excerpt form the strace output:
...
open("/usr/share/myspell/dicts/en_ZA.dic", O_RDONLY) = 21
fstat64(21, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=595723, ...}) = 0
mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb781f000
read(21, "53476\n!boerbul\n!likable\n!poes\nA\n"..., 4096) = 4096
mmap2(NULL, 221184, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb55c9000
write(2, "error: line 15: bad flag alias i"..., 40) = 40
write(2, "error: line 15: bad flag vector "..., 38) = 38
write(2, "error: line 16: bad flag alias i"..., 40) = 40
write(2, "error: line 16: bad flag vector "..., 38) = 38
write(2, "error: line 18: bad flag alias i"..., 40) = 40
write(2, "error: line 18: bad flag vector "..., 38) = 38
write(2, "error: line 19: bad flag alias i"..., 40) = 40
...

The whole file is 54Mb I could upload parts or whole if needed.