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.
