The characters in the text you are now reading align with an international open source standard, Unicode, which underpins the digitisation of written scripts. English dominates the internet, and has dominated the development of digital tools from the start. But encoding scripts for languages that do not use Roman letters is vital to the health and functioning of living cultures and societies, and to scholarship in those no longer spoken.
My friend Andy West, who has died aged 65 of a heart attack, played a prominent role at the heart of the network of experts who encoded Tibetan and other scripts for what, in China, are designated “minority” languages, a term he had little use for. He was also heavily involved in the encoding of historic Asian languages including Tangut and Khitan. Andy’s interests were capacious: the standard emojis for the dodo and the mammoth also bear his mark.
Known in Chinese as Wei An, as Ando in Esperanto, and online as BabelStone, Andy labelled himself a “defrocked academic”, a “rambling antiquarian”, and a “whisperer of stones”. He was all those and more. He set out to be a geologist after leaving school, fell quickly out of university, and began coding, but then began to teach himself classical Chinese for fun.
He was frustrated at having to wait for new instalments of the 1970s Penguin Classics translation of The Story of the Stone. This led him to take a degree course in Chinese (1983-88) at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, where I met him, then complete a PhD in classical Chinese literature at Princeton in 1993. The approach he adopted in developing a textual history of the Ming Dynasty novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is remembered by his adviser there as “a stroke of genius”.
Learning languages was like coding, he would later say. He taught himself a remarkable number of them, and actively worked on securing their digital life.
Andy was born in Dunfermline, the third of four children of a naval officer, Dennis West, and his wife, Shelagh Gardiner. He went to Bishop Vesey’s grammar school in Sutton Coldfield, then began studying geology at Leicester University, but left during his first year.
A stint as an academic at Yale University in the early 1990s ended unhappily due to office politics, and Andy made a living thereafter in the commercial world from coding, mainly for defence contractors in Britain. But his passion lay in script encoding, and he took early retirement in 2018 to concentrate on this work.
Diffident, passionate and kind, Andy met Wei-Wei, a lecturer in international trade, in Guangzhou in 1985, and proposed marriage to her three days later. She survives him, as do their two daughters, Amber and April, and his siblings, Sue, Richard and Fiona.
