Penguin Quick Guides Really Useful English Grammar

Creoles do vary depending on the social history surrounding creolization—especially on the initial ratio between the numbers of plantation owners (or colonists) and workers, how quickly and to what extent that ratio changed, and for how many generations the early-stage pidgin could gradually borrow more complexity from existing languages. Yet many similarities remain, particularly among those Creoles that quickly arose from early-stage pidgins. How did each Creole's children come so quickly to agree on a grammar, and why did the children of different Creoles tend to reinvent the same grammatical features again and again? It was not because they did it in the easiest or sole way possible to devise a language. For instance, Creoles use prepositions (short words preceding nouns), as do English and some other languages, but there are other languages that dispense with prepositions in favour of postpositions following nouns, or else noun case endings. Again, Creoles happen to resemble English in placing subject, verb, and object in that order, but the borrowing from English could not account for Creole grammar, because Creoles derived from languages with a different word order still use the subject-verb-object order ...»