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

Sinologist Sinology, also referred to as China studies, is a subfield of area studies or East Asian studies involved in social sciences and humanities research on China. It is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of the Chinese civilizatio ...

. His first works concerned Chinese novels of the Ming and

Qing The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing, was a Manchu-led Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China and an early modern empire in East Asia. The last imperial dynasty in Chinese history, the Qing dynasty was preceded by the ...

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 and ...

'' 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 who 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.Thoma ...

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 peoples, Tungusic East Asian people, East Asian ethnic group native to Manchuria in Northeast Asia. They are an officially recognized Ethnic minorities in China, ethnic minority in China and the people from wh ...

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

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

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 The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS University of London; ) 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 area ...

. * 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 Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

, including BabelPad and BabelMap.

BabelPad

BabelPad is a Unicode text editor with various tools for entering characters and performing text conversions such as

normalization Normalization or normalisation refers to a process that makes something more normal or regular. Science * Normalization process theory, a sociological theory of the implementation of new technologies or innovations * Normalization model, used in ...

and Unicode casing. BabelPad also supports a wide range of encodings, and has input methods for entering Chinese, Mongolian,

, 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, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...

and radical lookup tools for entering

Chinese characters Chinese characters are logographs used Written Chinese, to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represe ...

.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