Klema Field Notes
Klema Field Notes is an independent research blog maintained by Marie Roelandt and hosted at klema.tsuk.org. It publishes informal but closely argued analyses of material in the Kristiansen coding system, with a particular focus on the Zagi Tablets.
Notable posts
- "The Zagi Family" (18 March 2024): Roelandt argues that the sign UNIT in the Zagi corpus should be read as the kin term CHILD rather than as an abstract quantity, and demonstrates that this substitution produces natural genealogical statements of the form "X has N children" and "child N is Y." She identifies two structural templates—X DEF_PIVOT N CHILD and CHILD N EQ_PIVOT Y—and reads the AND_PLUS connector as a parental coupling marker.
- "Who's who in the Zagi family?" (12 April 2024): Building on the previous post, Roelandt assigns working transliterations to all sign types (explicitly not proposed as phonetic values) and uses these to reconstruct a multi-generational family tree from Documents 1–4. She identifies two families named CHILD-GENDERA and CHILD-GENDERB, two parental role terms distinguished by a suffix, and a gender-neutral parental term. She notes two probable scribal slips in Document 3 and stops short of proposing readings for the opening and closing lines of the corpus.
Relation to academic literature
Klema Field Notes explicitly engages with and cites Inrik Üksküla's preprint and Ginevra Rubergskier's Language Codes paper. Roelandt's CHILD reading may be seen as a development of Üksküla's Hypothesis B.