--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Nicholas Bodley" <nbodley@...> wrote:

>
> 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)?

I'm not sure that there are many, but the Cyrillic letter <ch> (as
transliterated into English) is <tsch> in German.

For abugidas one might claim a one-to-zero ratio for the implicit
vowel, which is unsurpassable.

If you count a diacritic as one letter, in the ISO transliteration
(not transcription), the Thai letters kho khuat (<kh> with bar above
and dot below the 'k') and tho than (<th> with bar above and dot
below the 't') are both transcribed as four letters. My grammar may
be wrong; I'm not sure anyone actually uses the ISO transliteration!
I've not come across any pirate copies of its definition, just one
despairing attempt at computerising it.

Richard.