variography

I could not find a better solution than to produce comprehensive tables and to collect in them all relevant variographs for a single given term, including moreover some additional material — that way, the user of this book can hardly fail to see that the extractions of a term are due to variographies. […] let us further assume that the spelling of this name is līnū; so we go to section ‘L’, where we find, in the column of the unknown, another name, līqu; this tells us that there exists a variograph, caused by a clerical error which, in fact, could easily be worse. […] signs are ‘characters’ (aškāl) or ‘graphical forms’ (ṣuwar) which signify meaning; pronunciation and ‘linguistic verification’ (ḥaqīqā fī al-luġa) are independent of meaning and hence irrelevant for the ‘recognition of an unknown word’ (taʿarruf al-maǧhūl); different ‘manifestations’ (ḍurūb) of the same sign, each being an ‘image of the unknown’ (ṣūrat al-maǧhūl), are ‘variographs’ (iḫtilāfāt) of a fictitious core element; the latter reveals itself, and may as such be memorized, by lining up its ‘variographies’ (iḫtilāf kitābatihi) through a process of systematic ‘derivation’ (istinbāṭ) or ‘extraction’ (istiḫrāǧ) — in other words, an obscure graphical entity becomes an extrapolation of a prototype or virtual ideograph which, in turn, becomes actual by establishing its semantic correlate in the target language.