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Andrew West 魏安

@babelstone.co.uk

1.6K followers 440 following 790 posts

Independent researcher of Tangut, Khitan, and Jurchen. Developer of BabelPad and BabelMap. Maintainer of BabelStone Han font. Responsible for adding over 10,000 characters to the Unicode Standard. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2063-7389

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Sep 6

40 years ago today I walked across the Lo Wu Bridge 羅湖橋 into China for the very first time — into a world that a year's intensive study of Mandarin and Classical Chinese at SOAS University of London had woefully ill-prepared me for.

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jul 30

It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that we, the family of Andrew West, confirm his peaceful passing on 10th July 2025. The BabelStone legacy will be continued by colleagues and friends.
corp.unicode.org/pipermail/un...

Andrew C. West 魏安 1960–2025

corp.unicode.org

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 29

Yeah, better avoid the Princeton Arms

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 27

U+8043 聃

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 22

Didn't he not touch the bible during his inauguration?

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 17

UK seems to be conspicuously absent

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 13

"Chinese Ethnicity" 中华民族 rears its ugly head again

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 12

The old SSEES entrance

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 9

It would be great if you can find it, but may be like looking for a needle in a haystack without the exact coordinates. 🤞

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 9

谢谢，看了，已经回信了，可是我实在没有空参加这个项目，请原谅。

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 8

I haven't read her paper or seen a rubbing of the inscription, so I can't comment, but by all reports the inscription is in poor condition.

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 7

See my critique of her reading of the Arkhara river Jurchen inscription, for which she reads the extraordinarily early date of 1127 on evidence that does not stand up to scrutiny

Jurchen Inscription on the River Arkhara

This post discusses a recently-identified inscription in the Jurchen script on the bank of the River Arkhara in Russia.

babelstone.co.uk

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 7

She has a miraculous ability to fluently and confidently read Khitan and Jurchen inscriptions which are obscure to everyone else. She also has a habit of accepting uncritically all sorts of modern fake inscriptions (either gullible or complicit, I don't know which)

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 6

Just be very cautious about anything that Aisin Gioro Ulhicun writes

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 5

And Sergoe UI Symbol which ships with Windows, so ⯨⯩⯪⯫ should render OK for people on a recent Windows machine

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 4

資治通鑑?

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 4

Is the base text 史記? The characters "鞅陽之聚縣丞縣田陌" on the first column appear in sequence in 史記卷68:

於是以『鞅』為大良造。將兵圍魏安邑，降之。居三年，作為築冀闕宮庭於咸『陽』，秦自雍徙都『之』。而令民父子兄弟同室內息者為禁。而集小（都）鄉邑『聚』為『縣』，置令、『丞』，凡三十一『縣』。為『田』開阡『陌』封疆，而賦稅平。平斗桶權衡丈尺。行之四年，公子虔復犯約，劓之。居五年，秦人富彊，天子致胙於孝公，諸侯畢賀。

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 2

Yes. Although it is possible to create your own input method or modify an existing input method, for example my BabelPad text editor easily allows for custom input methods:

Screenshot of BabelPad showing a custom Han pinyin input method listing characters with reading tā, including U+323BF 𲎿

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · Jun 2

As far as I am aware, nothing happens automatically, and those responsible for particular input methods will need to manually update them if they want to support the new characters — but very few CJK input methods ever update for new versions of Unicode!

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · May 28

I finally have sufficient confidence in my reconstruction to propose this character for encoding

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · May 27

My reconstruction and identification of a partially-preserved Tangut character in a unique fragment of the Homophones text held at the British Library www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n53...

Fragment of folio 56A of the B version of the Tangut Homophones text held at the British Library, showing twelve partial entries with eight complete or partial head characters. The partial head character on the bottom right is identified and proposed for encoding in the linked document.

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · May 27

My reconstruction and identification of a partially-preserved Tangut character in a unique fragment of the Homophones text held at the British Library www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n53...

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · May 25

First step towards the encoding of Jurchen *small script* characters, by @cosmicore.bsky.social and myself www.unicode.org/wg2/docs/n53...

Gold paizi found in Chengde, Hebei in 1972, with a vertical inscription in Jurchen small script characters (two clusters of three characters each) beneath a huaya 花押 symbol. Photograph courtesy of Vladimir Belyaev.

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · May 23

This was of course unacceptable to ISO member bodies, especially those not in the privileged set of ten, so Germany 🇩🇪 and Ireland 🇮🇪 proposed to encode 676 characters for all ISO 3166-1 two-letter codes (AA–ZZ), representing flags for all actual and potential ISO-recognized countries and territories.

ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · May 23

Back in 2009 when emoji encoding was being thrashed out acrimoniously by the Unicode Technical Committee and ISO member bodies, the UTC did not want to encode a full set of national flag emoji, but only wanted to encode emoji for the ten national flags used in Japanese vendor sets (🇨🇳🇩🇪🇪🇸🇫🇷🇬🇧🇮🇹🇯🇵🇰🇷🇷🇺🇺🇸).

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · May 23

It's about as likely as Unicode adding a Confederate flag emoji (which I assume we are only days or weeks away from Trump demanding)

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Andrew West 魏安 @babelstone.co.uk · May 10

Previous discussion on the same question of the Tangutishness of the Japanese invented script

Akerbeltz / Mìcheal an Fhaclair / LowRisingTone @akerbeltz.bsky.social · Aug 8

@babelstone.bsky.social you've probably come across this before - Fat how Tangut-ish is this script I wonder? www.reddit.com/r/linguistic...