We face here a special case of disambiguation: ‘un général byzantin du vie siècle’ (a Byzantine general of the sixth century) should translate: un generali bizantinu di u 6esimu seculu. French ‘vie’ is ambiguous between vita and 6esimu or VIesimu (life/sixth). In effect, ‘vi’ is sometimes used for the roman numeral ‘VI’. In this case, ‘VIe’ is unambiguous.

This also rises the interesting and more general issue: are ambiguities a weakness for a language? Is it better for a language to have few ambiguities?