Sept haï-kaïs "La petite tortue ...", is only seventeen measures long—the number of syllables in a Japanese haiku. Alexis Roland-Manuel remarked on this "mélodie": "Do not let your modesty make you forget a certain fable by La Fontaine. You hurry slowly, perhaps, but none of your steps are wasted. How many hares envy you!" The harmony is pricked with fine, expressive dissonances. For the third "mélodie", "Le coq ...", the instruments "peck" the melody with appoggiaturas in a spirit similar to that in Ravel's "Histoires naturelles" (1906). According to Andrieu, "Maurice Delage's composition is simple and refined; the composer stays ever attentive
Old Japanese line of the first poem in the "Kojiki" was written with five characters: This method of writing Japanese syllables by using characters for their Chinese sounds ("ongana") was supplemented with indirect methods in the complex mixed script of the "Man'yōshū" (c. 759). In "man'yōgana", each Old Japanese syllable was represented by a Chinese character. Although any one of several characters could be used for a given syllable, a careful analysis revealed that 88 syllables were distinguished in the "Kojiki": The system has the same gaps of "yi" and "wu" found in later forms of Japanese. However, many syllables that have