Andrew West (linguist)
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.
Andrew West | |
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Andrew West at the Cloud Platform at Juyongguan, in front of a Tangut Buddhist inscription, December 2013 | |
| Born | Andrew Christopher West 31 March 1960 |
| Nationality | British |
| Academic background | |
| Education |
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| 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.
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 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.