View source for Jan-Tage Kristiansen

'''Jan-Tage Kristiansen''' (born 1971) is a Norwegian-Estonian philologist and independent researcher based in Tallinn. He trained as a linguist at the University of Bergen, where his MA thesis examined positional constraints in runic epigraphy, before completing a doctorate at the University of Tartu in 2001 on graphemic variability in undeciphered scripts of the eastern Baltic region.

Kristiansen worked for several years as a cataloguer at the Estonian History Museum before leaving institutional employment to pursue independent research. He has described his working method as "palaeographic accountancy": systematic inventory of graphemic features before any interpretive commitment.

== Work ==
Kristiansen's correspondence note "Twin renderings, single template: a ruled signary on a putative cervid scapula" (''language'' 27, October 2023: 1073–1074) introduced the alphanumeric coding system now used throughout the scholarly literature on the [[Scapula Glyph Inscription]] and related texts. The note described a short, four-line inscription on a scapula-shaped object, identified nine visually coherent sign families (labelled A through T, with P reserved for the divider), and provided a full positional frequency table. Kristiansen declined to propose a cultural attribution, noting that circulating images of the object appeared to derive from a single original drawing and that higher-resolution imaging was desirable before drawing further conclusions.

The coding system he established, in which each sign receives a family letter and index number (C01, B04, P01, and so on), was subsequently adopted without modification by [[Ginevra Rubergskier]], [[Camille Voudrin]], [[Inrik Üksküla]], and others, giving the note an influence disproportionate to its two-page length.

Kristiansen has continued to maintain the signary as a stable reference document, issuing minor corrections to the preliminary frequency table following the appearance of higher-quality tracings in 2024. He has not published a full interpretive article of his own, describing his role as "keeping the inventory honest."

== Other interests ==
Outside the Kristiansen corpus, Kristiansen has published short notes on pre-Christian Baltic carved artefacts and on quantitative approaches to grapheme classification. He maintains a low profile and rarely attends conferences in person.

== See also ==
* [[Scapula Glyph Inscription]]
* [[Dozenal Primer Inscription]]
* [[Zagi Tablets]]
* [[Ginevra Rubergskier]]

[[Category:Researchers]][[Category:Epigraphy]][[Category:Kristiansen corpus]]