Experiment: how would you transliterate the following glyphs?

[Koen G]

I don't understand why there should be several ways to write these glyphs, to me it looks like it's always two strokes: the e or i first, then the loop that ends with a tail (or not).

If you intend on writing an 8-shape, wouldn't you start going clockwise in the top loop instead of drawing a "c" first and then lifting the pen? (I still know very little about this). If you are right that they generally drew the c-shape first, this would be interesting, because like you say several glyphs would be natural "stops" along the same trajectory. And even though they could probably have formed the "8" in a different way, they still followed this trajectory to write it.