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I'm still not sure I agree - the alternative verb formations give information that can help to understand the sentence.
As an example in a language a little less dated, in Spanish if you say "Ella te ama" it's clearly "She loves you" and if you botch it up and say "Te ama ella" it can be worked out to mean the same. In English, switching the word order thusly would change it to "You love her." It helps a little that the "Te" is a direct object form rather than a subject form, but even if I botched that up the verb would probably make it clear.
I should point out that even as I write this I can see the sense in your point - it feels like English would handle this better - but the logic of the languages I've studied seems to argue the other way. Maybe I just can't get past the fact that English is my first language and thus will always be the most easily comprehended, even when garbled a bit.
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I've been basing my viewpoint on direct experience. Mostly South East Asian, admittedly, where there is little in common between the native languages of the locals and English except a smattering of loan-words from English. No matter how badly garbled the word order is, I can generally work out the meaning without any real effort except where the speaker also uses incorrect words.
The other thing is that most of them don't get ALL of the word order wrong. None of them, for instance, would say "Order Different Word in Languages"
Also, I guess, there is an emphasis in most of these countries on learning English, and they do make an effort which you naturally reciprocate.
I enjoy Europe for the fact that you can almost always find someone who speaks enough English to understand you when you have no idea about the local language.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Because of our language issues, two extremely common scenarios are English speakers trying to learn French and French speakers trying to learn English. I know a lot of people on both sides of this equation and know that the English speakers have a much harder time of it than French speakers.
I am told English is easier to learn because you don’t have to worry about attributing every single word properly. “The table is red” in English is easier to learn than the French “La table est brune” because you have to know that a) a table is female and b) the adjective has to be gendered accordingly, so it is not brun but brune.
English speakers say the French use too many words, and that everything has to be attributed and conjugated correctly to be understood.
The word order is important because of all this attribution.
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.. Prove at the time of the coining of that old cliché had the meaning test. The rule could be proved and found wanting.While, at first sight, this explanation has a seductive quality, I am still unconvinced. First, the corresponding german phrase has the word "bestätigt.." for "proves", and there is no way of interpreting this as "test", it clearly means "confirms". Second, and more important, your hypothesis would mean that any rule which has a single exception is invalid and is to be discarded! this would, in my opinion, deprive the word rule of its specific meaning: "as a rule, I only cross the street when the light is green..."  .
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Wsieber is right. The expression is old, perhaps mediaeval, perhaps ancient, since it occurs in Latin as exceptio probat regulum or exceptio confirmat regulum. Now probat is indeed 'probes, tests', though I don't know (OED please) at what time it took on the modern sense 'proves (conclusively)': did this happen in mediaeval Latin or early modern English?
But confirmat is presumably 'confirms, bestätigt'. There is an alternative explanation for the meaning of the phrase, namely that the need to point out an exception to a rule proves or confirms that a rule exists to make an exception from. The example quoted in Chambers is that No smoking abaft the funnel implies that smoking is allowed before the funnel.
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CapitalKiwi:
I've been basing my viewpoint on direct experience. Mostly South East Asian, [...]
The other thing is that most of them don't get ALL of the word order wrong. None of them, for instance, would say "Order Different Word in Languages"
I think it's widespread -- I won't say universal because I don't know -- that languages that don't mark case roles tend to have SVO order, e.g. English, Chinese, Malay/Indonesian. Not rigidly, as OVS is also very common in Malay, but in shifting between them you'd quickly work out that SVO was safe and neutral.
There are near-universals of word order, such as that VSO implies noun-adjective (Welsh, Arabic) but SOV implies adjective-noun (Turkish, Japanese), and so also for prepositions versus postpositions, standards of comparison, etc.
SVO, being in the middle, doesn't have such clear matches, e.g. French N-Adj vs English Adj-N.
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NicholasW wrote: The example quoted in Chambers is that No smoking abaft the funnel implies that smoking is allowed before the funnel.
This seems to get us back to the first post in this thread - wouldn't assuming that one could smoke before the funnel be begging the question?
This example also leaves me puzzled. In this example, there seems to be a proscriptive rule, rather than a rule based on standard practice or theory. In other words, "the rule says no" vs. "as I rule I do this" or even the Laws of Thermodynamics as a rule based on observation of the behavior of things. This is not how I had understood this phrase to be used. I understood it to mean that, based on observation, one might derive a rule for the behavior of something (e.g, every day my cat gets up and scratches at the door frame and I rush to open the door before he does further damage to the wood) or the example of earlier "as a rule, I cross at a green light" and that somehow an exception to this rule would prove it. Because of this understanding I was (briefly) very pleased to hear about the other, older meaning of "prove" as "to test" - it made a nice logical package.
Now I must ask - in this saying, are we talking about a rule that dictates behavior (e.g. No Smoking) or a standard practice ("as a rule") or a theory based on observation?
What's the rule here?
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NicholasW wrote: The example quoted in Chambers is that No smoking abaft the funnel implies that smoking is allowed before the funnel.
Hyla responded: This seems to get us back to the first post in this thread - wouldn't assuming that one could smoke before the funnel be begging the question?
Certainly in the world of symbolic logic Hyla would be correct but in the real world (if there is such a place) the notion of forbidding some specific action in some specific place would be taken to imply that that action was permitted in other places.
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CapK asks, anent prove meaning test: Does anyone have any reference for when it was first used?
OED to the rescue. The first citation, involving only form, is from 1175. The first citation in the section covering the definition is from 1200 and uses it in the sense of test.
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Faldage replies: The first citation, involving only form, is from 1175.... at which time the mathematic proof of the null hypothesis was well known. "As a rule, we Outremerans occupy the Holy Land. This is proven because we still hold Krak des Chevaliers". Which statement would have been true for another 17 years or thereabouts.  Ta, Faldage.
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