Andrew Christopher West (Chinese: 魏安; pinyin: Wèi Ān; born 31 March 1960) is an English Sinologist. His first works concerned Chinese novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties. His study of Romance of the Three Kingdoms used a new approach to analyse the relationship among the various versions, extrapolating the original text of that novel.[1][2]
Andrew West
| |
|---|---|
Andrew West at the Cloud Platform at Juyongguan, in front of a Tangut Buddhist inscription, December 2013
| |
| Born | Andrew Christopher West (1960-03-31) 31 March 1960 (age 64) |
| Nationality | British |
| Academic background | |
| Education |
|
| Thesis | Quest of the Urtext: The Textual Archaeology of 'The Three Kingdoms' (1993) |
| Doctoral advisor | Andrew H. Plaks |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Sinologist |
| Institutions | Yale University |
| Website | babelstone.co.uk |
West compiled a catalogue for the Chinese-language library of the English missionary Robert Morrison containing 893 books representing in total some 10,000 string-bound fascicules.[3][4]
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,[5] which was subsequently included in Unicode 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.
West is the developer of a number of software products and fonts for Microsoft Windows, including BabelPad and BabelMap.
BabelPad is a Unicode text editor with various tools for entering characters and performing text conversions such as normalization and Unicode casing.[6] 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.[7]
BabelMap is a Unicode character map application that supports all Unicode blocks and characters, and includes various utilities such as pinyin and radical lookup tools for entering Chinese characters.[8]