Oddly enough, the differences in the spoken language on either side of the pond are smaller than the regional differences between the North and South of England - I've never had any trouble understanding what an American speaker had to say, while I have found people speaking Scouse - the dialect of Newcastle-on-Tyne - rather difficult to follow. All languages have regional differences but as long as the speakers find one another mutually comprehensible it's still one language - though the linguist's rule of thumb, that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy is nicely illustrated by the distinction between Swedish, Norwegian and Danish.
Norway became independent of Sweden in 1905
Paradoxically, while Dutch is officially a single language spoken both in the Netherlands and the Fleming provinces of Belgium, in Belgian progams shown on Dutch TV, the Flemish Dutch is usually under-titled to help the Dutch understand the Fleming pronunciations.
Australian English does have its own dictionary, the Macquarie dictionary of Australian English
It doesn't go in for spelling reform, though it does differe from the OED in listing "realise" as the more common spelling of the word "realize".
It is scarcely a simplication to end up with half the world using "colour" and the other half "color".
n.
Spelling is a mechanism for representing the spoken language as text - it has no perceptible effect on the subtleties of the spoken language. People have looked for such effects and they don't seem to exist.
The point being that you can invent a hypothetical time-saving to justify Noah Webster's meddling? Americans don't - in fact - type better or faster than English speakers who use the OED spellings. Copy-typing is an obsolete skill and everybody else types at a rate that is determined by the speed at which they can think up the text, where a letter here or there doesn't make any difference at all.
And where does that mention new words? If Noah Webster had confined himself creating a dictionary which included words and word usages peculiar to the U.S.A. nobody would have had anything to object to. I was objecting to his amateurish and half-baked efforts at spelling reform.
It is useful to have deprecated and archaic words in a dictionary - precisely because they are no long in common use, people find it necessary to consult a dictionary when they run into them in old texts.
Arbitrary and half-baked spelling reform is the last thing you want in your dictionary - precisely because it makes it more difficult to deal with old or foreign text.
That doesn't make him a charlatan. A charlatan intends to deceive.
My claim was that Noah Webster became a spelling reformer by immortalising his own spelling mistakes, and opted to persist with them when he realised that they were mistakes, on the basis that as they were American mistakes. an American Nationalist had a duty to use them to squeeze out British publishers from his American market. A self-serving stance, but one that he got away with.
-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen