Andrew Christopher West (; born 31 March 1960) is an English
Sinologist. 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 peop ...
and
Qing 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 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.Thomas Hale 'On Being a Mi ...
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, 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, wh ...
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.
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.
* 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, 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,
Manchu,
Tibetan,
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 Chinese, Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally writte ...
and
radical 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