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 Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of va ...

of the Ming 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-speaki ...

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 an ...

'' 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 Khitan or Khitai may refer to: *Khitan (circumcision), the Islamic circumcision rite *Khitan people, an ancient nomadic people located in Mongolia and northern China *Liao dynasty (916–1125), a dynasty of China ruled by the Khitan Yelü clan **Nor ...

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) and Q ...

, and

Mongolian Mongolian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Mongolia, a country in Asia * Mongolian people, or Mongols * Mongolia (1911–24), the government of Mongolia, 1911–1919 and 1921–1924 * Mongolian language * Mongolian alphabet * Mong ...

. 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.

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 Irina Fedorovna Popova (russian: Ирина Фёдоровна Попова; born September 28, 1961) is a Russian sinologist and historian. Since April 2003 she has been the Director of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Acade ...

(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 Normalization or normalisation refers to a process that makes something more normal or regular. Most commonly it refers to: * Normalization (sociology) or social normalization, the process through which ideas and behaviors that may fall outside of ...

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

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 '' kan ...

.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