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Match Slavic -ovich/-ovitch surname spelling variants in saint search - #177

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brianglass merged 1 commit into
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saint-search-mockup
Aug 13, 2026
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Match Slavic -ovich/-ovitch surname spelling variants in saint search#177
brianglass merged 1 commit into
mainfrom
saint-search-mockup

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Summary

Follow-up to #175/#176. A search for "John Maximovitch" returned nothing, even though that's an exact substring of an existing saint's name in our data ("St John Maximovitch, Metropolitan of Tobolsk") -- turned out to be two compounding issues:

  • The actual exact-spelling match has no story, so it's correctly excluded by the story-less-result filter from Search UX polish and more fragmented saint-identity merges #176.
  • The saint people are actually looking for -- St John of Shanghai and San Francisco, a much more famous 20th-century saint who happens to share the same family surname (they're distantly related) -- is spelled "Maximovich" (no "t") in our data, and our transliteration matching didn't cover this pattern.

Added a vitch -> vich rule to normalize_transliteration, alongside the existing Greek rules -- older English convention sometimes rendered the Slavic "-ovich" patronymic ending as "-ovitch". Confirmed via a corpus survey that this is a narrow, low-risk addition: only this one name pair uses either spelling currently.

Test plan

  • Full test suite passes (150 tests) against a from-scratch image build
  • Manually verified in-browser: searching "John Maximovitch" now redirects straight to St John of Shanghai and San Francisco's page

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

https://claude.ai/code/session_01Hf6j2xXQXywHVh3HAVRxB3

Older English convention sometimes rendered the "-ovich" patronymic
ending as "-ovitch" (e.g. "Maximovitch" vs "Maximovich"); add that as a
transliteration.normalize_transliteration rule alongside the existing
Greek ones, so search matches across it too.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Hf6j2xXQXywHVh3HAVRxB3
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brianglass merged commit 6ebc549 into main Aug 13, 2026
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