) but liberal arts baffling math/natural science whizzes (and the converse) has always baffled ME. Well I've heard the math/language and also the math->musical composition comparisons but while I acknowledge math is a type of language it's never really seemed to translate haha rdrr to any skill at linguistics or music in me at least.
It is a logical process, just with different premises. I mean, you already do it to some extent: When you see "2X2" what comes to mind? I bet it is the words "two times two" not two pairs of objects. One COULD even say math is a special case of grammar, with its own supplementary set of operational rules, but that might be pushing things. Yes, I am a grammar pusher; the first verb's free....
Well, that's definitely outside my zone but I'd speculate ambiguity about a number vs word thing could in some cases be due to that ambiguity having come to take on extra meaning. If someone conducted a survey and had a sample size of 411 when all was done, they might make a crack 'and with 411 you know you're getting information' that might elude a lot of people even today but not 20 years ago, and is likely to totally elude people 2000 years down the road. "We had 314 applicants to the Pie contest, big surprise!" has a certain level of subtle humor that could send a scholar hunting around a million false trails trying to figure out why it wasn't surprising and the person who raises the Pi/Pie thing might be sneered at as stupid.
There's probably a lot more of that in a language with number/letter shared symbols. For all I know the writer might have meant both, because the dual interpretation is what the writer sought to convey. Considering how often we toss around stuff like "I went on the winery tour with Grape Expectations but didn't find it that a peeling, hahaha" I would expect a lot of wit and humor and deep thought to express themselves in that sort of way with number/letter overlap. That's all purely guesswork though.
My impression, which is only that, is that kind of thing happens a lot in the bible, not sure about elsewhere. Some translations explicitly identify amibiguous cases in the historical Prophets (I am thinking of sections in the Samuels and Kings referring to great heroes as "the Three" and "the Thirty," where context could have a great bearing on meaning.)
)Cladistics and MRCA doens't tend to grab my interest much, I'm afraid. On this matter what I'd mostly like to know is if there was any positional notation, you know, for the vitally important question about whether they could use two dice to great a first and second digit.
It is the great question of our age, perhaps multiple ages, given the age of the dice; the secrets of the universe lie within our reach, yet just beyond our grasp.
From what I can tell though, positional notation was virtually unheard of in ancient numbers; they seem to have preferred additive notation, with the extra wrinkle of distinct symbol sets for larger and smaller numbers. One infamous example, courtesy Wikipedia, is that in Koiné (which it seems likely this die used) the number χξς would be understood as χ+ξ+ς, or 600+60+6. Interestingly, Wikipedia further notes that in his early revision of a Latin NT Jerome wrote that "The number 666 has been substituted for 616 either by analogy with 888, the [Greek] number of Jesus (Deissmann), or because it is a triangular number, the sum of the first 36 numbers (1+2+3+4+5+6...+36=666.)" Even then, it seems, the evils of science, or at least the related heresy, math, were corrupting the Holy Church. 
Regardless, it LOOKS like they could have used multiple dice to generate larger numbers, and perhaps did, but the other dice would have used a completely different symbol set, additively. Another point of interest here is that the ancients generally mapped the digits 1-9 and their multiples of 10 and 100. That means there were 27 possible digits (forcing Koiné to modify three letters for use as numbers,) so a d20 could not contain all of them. Further, even if it held, say, the digits 1-10 and 10-100, it would have to omit any digits >10 that were not multiples of 10. To function as our d20 it would have to be enscribed with the digits 1-10, then the 10 digit followed by the digits 1-9 (or the reverse; by the Commutative Property of Addition it does not matter,) then the 20 digit.
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