With the current Interesting Situation in [The]* Ukraine, I wanted to see
the names of the contenders in Cyrillic, suspecting that "shch" would
collapse by "back-transliteration" into one Cyr. letter. It did. Of
course, I needed to locate the names in [nominative?] case, first.
*Old usage?
Two points:

1) A four-to-one ratio of letters seems impressive; are there many such
instances, considering better-known languages (say, "top 100" or so)?

(Does "Mtskheta" become shorter in Georgian? One letter shorter?)
(Obscure river name, state of Miss., fairly sure: "Tchoutacabouffa", which
looks equiv. to "Chucatabufa", also "Ouagadougou", equiv. to "Wagadugu".
See also spellings of "Chechnya" in Russian and German.)

2) A very different realm (phonetics cum acoustics): Seems that the
difference between Cyrillic Ш and Щ is the resonant frequency, a formant,
of the front of one's mouth cavity. The latter, I think, has a much-higher
frequency. True?

I can recall some very incomplete attempts by my father (a native Russian
speaker) to teach me the Russian alphabet; he clearly, as I recall,
sounded the differences between those two letters, and as a boy, I
couldn't see why the difference mattered. In turn, his mindset (he was
intelligent!) was not prepared to emphasize that in Russian, the
difference really does matter. He was gentle, on such occasions.

Ah, one more:
In India, what is a double [ch], as in "(Rann of) Kachch"? Does that
indicate primarily that the letter [ch] is doubled in the original form?
Would "Kach" correctly represent the name as spoken?

Thanks!

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
struggling, again, to limit questions primarily about linguistics
Steam loco: ch ch ch ch ...