Andrew Christopher West (; born 31 March 1960) is an English

Sinologist Sinology, or Chinese studies, is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of China primarily through Chinese philosophy, language, literature, culture and history and often refers to Western scholarship. Its origin "may be traced to the ex ...

. His first works concerned Chinese novels of the

Ming The Ming dynasty (), officially the Great Ming, was an imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last orthodox dynasty of China ruled by the Han pe ...

and

Qing The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speak ...

dynasties. His study of ''

Romance of the Three Kingdoms ''Romance of the Three Kingdoms'' () is a 14th-century historical novel attributed to Luo Guanzhong. It is set in the turbulent years towards the end of the Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history, starting in 184 AD ...

'' used a new approach to analyse the relationship among the various versions, extrapolating the original text of that novel. West compiled a catalogue for the Chinese-language library of the English

missionary A missionary is a member of a Religious denomination, religious group which is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.Tho ...

Robert Morrison containing 893 books representing in total some 10,000 string-bound fascicules. His subsequent work is in the minority languages of China, especially Khitan,

Manchu The Manchus (; ) are a Tungusic East Asian ethnic group native to Manchuria in Northeast Asia. They are an officially recognized ethnic minority in China and the people from whom Manchuria derives its name. The Later Jin (1616–1636) an ...

, and Mongolian. He proposed an encoding scheme for the 'Phags-pa script, which was subsequently included in

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

version 5.0. West has also worked to encode gaming symbols and phonetic characters to the UCS, and has been working on encodings for Tangut and

Jurchen Jurchen may refer to: * Jurchen people, Tungusic people who inhabited the region of Manchuria until the 17th century ** Haixi Jurchens, a grouping of the Jurchens as identified by the Chinese of the Ming Dynasty ** Jianzhou Jurchens, a grouping of ...

Works

* 1996. ''Sānguó yǎnyì bǎnběn kǎo'' 三國演義版本考 study of the editions of ''Romance of the Three Kingdoms'' Shanghai: Shanghai Classics Publishing House. * 1998
''Catalogue of the Morrison Collection of Chinese Books''
(馬禮遜藏書書目). London:

SOAS SOAS University of London (; the School of Oriental and African Studies) is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the federal University of London. Founded in 1916, SOAS is located in the Bloomsbury are ...

. * 2012. "Musical Notation for Flute in Tangut Manuscripts". In Irina Fedorovna Popova (ed.), ''Тангуты в Центральной Азии: сборник статей в честь 80-летия проф. Е.И.Кычанова'' E. I. Kychanov pp. 443–453. Moscow: Oriental Literature. *2016
''Gerard Clauson's Skeleton Tangut (Hsi Hsia) Dictionary: A facsimile edition''
With an introduction by Imre Galambos. With Editorial notes and an Index by Andrew West. Prepared for publication by Michael Everson. Portlaoise: Evertype. .

Software

West is the developer of a number of software products and fonts for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

, including BabelPad and BabelMap.

BabelPad

BabelPad is a Unicode text editor with various tools for entering characters and performing text conversions such as normalization and Unicode casing. BabelPad also supports a wide range of encodings, and has input methods for entering Chinese, Mongolian,

Tibetan Tibetan may mean: * of, from, or related to Tibet * Tibetan people, an ethnic group * Tibetan language: ** Classical Tibetan, the classical language used also as a contemporary written standard ** Standard Tibetan, the most widely used spoken diale ...

, Uyghur and Yi text, as well as for entering individual Unicode characters by their hexadecimal code point value.

BabelMap

BabelMap is a Unicode character map application that supports all Unicode blocks and characters, and includes various utilities such as

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese fo ...

and

radical Radical may refer to: Politics and ideology Politics * Radical politics, the political intent of fundamental societal change *Radicalism (historical), the Radical Movement that began in late 18th century Britain and spread to continental Europe an ...

lookup tools for entering

Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji ...

.Yannis Haralambous and P. Scott Horne,
Fonts & Encodings
' (O'Reilly, 2007) pp.161–163

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:West, Andrew British sinologists 1960 births People educated at Bishop Vesey's Grammar School Living people People involved with Unicode Tangutologists