Vowel “a” and half-height consonants

The title of this chapter mentions half-height consonants. “Half of what height?”, the intelligent reader might wonder.

Well, shorthand is normally written on lined paper. For example, the text “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be thy name” would be written like this:

Each writing line is divided into four imaginary “quarter-height” parts:

All symbols introduced in this chapter are half a line-height tall. And here they are:

The first two symbols are written upward, and roughly correspond to character “a”. The first symbol is used for two different sounds:

All the other symbols are written downward. The first