English

Noun

metagraphy ‎(countable and uncountable, plural metagraphies)

1. (obsolete, rare, uncountable) Synonym of transliteration
   • 1849, A. J. Ellis, “Phonetic Spelling”, in The Prospective Review, volume 5, page 306:

     To represent letters like those of Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian, &c., by English characters, is, undoubtedly, a help to the scholar; a help with the special philologist often professes to contemn, but which the comparative philologist often misses. We will call this Metagraphy, or Transliteration.

   • 1899 September 9, Sir Isaac Pitman, “The Paris Shorthand Congress of 1900”, in The Phonetic Journal, volume 58, page 565:

     Considerable attention will be paid to metagrapnic methods, and to the application of metagraphy to foreign languages.

2. (art, countable) metagraphics; hypergraphy
   • 1983, Stephen C. Foster, Lettrisme: into the present, page 29:

     The rich and free merging of visual arts and literature envisioned by Isou in 1949-1950 under the name of "metagraphy" appeared fertile to many more people than the one proposed earlier with Lettrist painting, left almost unnoticed.

   • 2002, Rob Young, Undercurrents: the hidden wiring of modern music, page 191:

     For all their energised glory, the graphic scores of the Cageans (like the metagraphies of the Lettrists, and thus exactly like pre-Futurist scores) demanded a priestcraft to ensure their authentic interpretation.

   • 2006, Cartographic Perspectives: Bulletin of the North American Cartographic Information Society:

     In 1950 the Letterist, Maurice Lemaltre, had published Riff-raff, a ten-page "metagraphy," which included a sequence that zoomed from the solar system through a drawing of the earth to maps of Europe, France, and Paris, and Finally one of Saint Germain de Prés.

   • 2008, Adriano Spatola, Toward Total Poetry, page 58:

     […] in an attempt to elaborate a sort of hypergraphy, or super-writing, produced to go beyond the limits of the preceding metagraphy, or post-writing.

3. (linguistics, uncountable) Symbolism that has no counterpart in speech.
   • 1987, Alfred Arteaga, Language, Discourse, Sign: Reading Dialogisms in the Texts of Shakespeare and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz:

     Pilico and Aztec's presence in Spanish ritual, through metagraphy, novelistic speech, and heteroglossia, marks their presence in a dialogue.

   • 2002, Katherine Koppenhaver, Attorney's Guide to Document Examination, page 253:

     Metagraphy: symbols understood even though they have no conventional counterpart in speech. For example, footprints to illustrate walking or sawing wood for snoring.

   • 2014, Farhad Daftary, editor, The Study of Shi‘i Islam: History, Theology and Law:

     Also frequent is the use of a 'key letter' which occurs in both the mathal and mamthūl (metagraphy).

Related terms

• metagraphic
• metagraphical