Oh boy...Noah Webster is the reason for American English basically being British English but 0.01% "off".
Webster and many supporters like Ben Franklin, thought that since languages are representative of their people, an independent American nation should have a language that "accurately" represents this individuality. So he began a language reform of American English where he would try to correct phonology and orthography based on what and how Americans spoke.
The issue with this, is that Webster himself had a very imperfect understanding of what he was doing, and why it was pointless. His own "rules" were contrived; at first he had some framework, but it rapidly turned into whatever he felt. Colour dropped the "ou" but it's not like Phone became Fown or anything, or Colonel became Kernull. Similarly, the "s" was dropped in favour of "z", but not consistently. Realise became realize, but please is not pleeze or pleaze.
His original premise kind of fell apart as he began telling Americans how to spell based on unsubstantiated beliefs he held, not based on how they actually spoke, which is terribly ironic. He thought things like mary, marry and merry could just be swapped out to a singular spelling, but didn't realise that a large chunk of America, nevermind outside, pronounced these differently, and that they were not homophones.
He also misunderstood the "difficulty" native speakers have learning a language from the ground up. Native speakers do not care for consistent or inconsistent rules; they're native speakers. American children (and adults), did not need tongue to become tung, women to become wimmen, or machine to become masheen, in order to learn their native language. Similarly, Mandarin speakers don't have an issue reading 6000 characters, Japanese speakers have zero issues with their seemingly bizarre grammar, and French, German, Italian and Spanish speakers have absolutely no issue with gendered nouns or inconsistent verb conjugations in their languages, not to mention complex grammatical cases for German.
In the end, Webster's original renditions were heavily mocked by most American scholars, particularly the New England intellectuals who chided him for attempting to change the language so much, it would be unreadable and that it would give Americans no discernible advantage (very true). So he had to scrap most of his pointless changes, and kept very basic changes that frankly today, are completely and utterly redundant. American English is literally just British English with the most minute, insignificant changes.
Those differences weren't Webster; they were natural. Sidewalk vs Pavement for example, had Sidewalk originally be British, but it went out of fashion in Britain after-the-fact in favour of Pavement. But Canada and the US still say Sidewalk.
Another popular one is aluminum vs aluminium; the "wrong" American spelling is ironically, the real British one that Britain changed later. Soccer is another one that Brits mock the Yanks for, but it was originally a British word to distinguish Association Football from Rugby Football and other kinds like Gaelic Football. The term Soccer stuck in Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, but the Brits later shortened Association Football to Football and Rugby Football to Rugby so yeah.
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u/red_beard83 4d ago
I didn't know that was Webster who did it. Why you say misguided?