Fact-checking the Independent
Here:
The philosopher K'ung Fu-tzu, known in the West as Confucius, distilled his vision in six written works: The Book of Poetry, The Book of Rituals, The Book of History, The Book of Changes, The Spring and Autumn Annals, and The Book of Music. This last is lost.
Shorter correction: it is, but he didn't.
Longer correction: What you have there is the Five Classics, plus the "Sixth Classic", which left the Classics to marry its high school sweetheart back when they were still playing dives in Hamburg. But modern scholars agree that Confucius didn't write those classics. (For one thing, most of them predate him in some form or another considerably.) He certainly referred to and commented on them, and his ideas influenced the way they were transmitted and understood afterwards, and last I heard the theory that he did the final edit on the Book of Songs hasn't been completely discredited... but this is a far cry from "distill[ing] his vision in ... written works".
The ironic thing is that the article completely ignores the one written work that is, in a sense, a distillation of Confucius's vision: the Analects. Of course, these were compiled by followers and disciples rather than written down by the C-note himself, but they happen to include this relevant sentence:
子曰:“述而不作,信而好古,窃比于我老彭。”
The Master said, "A transmitter and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients, I venture to compare myself with our old P'ang."
(Apparently "old P'ang" is P'eng Tsu, who allegedly lived for 2000 years and also got a shout-out from Chuang-tzu. It makes sense that P'*ng would have loved and believed in the ancients, since, you know, he was one.)
IbaDaiRon:
Maybe something similar is going on the labyrinth between the ears of The Chompster (as senility encroaches), explaining his harking back to the linguistics of Aristotle and company. With the passage of the sandstorms of Time, nostalgia is such a beach.
Wade-Giles really brings on the itchy twitchies for me. Component ordering issues aside ahem!, I much prefer the simplicity of the pinyin system. (Which is odd, since for Japanese I like the Hepburn...?!?) Of course, in the mouths of the ignorant this results in travesties like "Kong Foozy" and "Zuh-hwang zee", not to mention geographical impossibilities such as "Zee-an" or "Ksee-an".
(sigh)