Could "a" be a ligature?

[pfeaster]

why is CIIII 14? I don't see it... I would say CIIII would mean 104. 8 * 104 makes 832, which neatly divides by 26 (832 / 26 = 32). Could it be that each letter is included 32 times?

[aiii] = CIIII would be 104 if the characters were read using their usual Roman numeral values.  But since there aren't any equally common and recognizable tokens of V, X, L, and so on in Voynichese, there are a lot of numbers under 104 that couldn't be straightforwardly encoded in that same way.

That said, in a system like the one being proposed, Voynichese [c] could just as well represent 10, and a [d]-loop 5, and so on.  Or [c] could even represent 12, and a [d]-loop 6, or something like that.  There are still some problems with this -- what Voynichese vord would represent the number two, for example?  But a system could be Roman-numeral-like without exactly following Roman numerals.