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Originally Posted by JSWolf
The UK is the home of Olde English. Modern English not so much. Americans had Daniel Webster to help modernize English.
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Only the Northern Ireland part of the UK. A lot of Queen Elizabeth stuff (1st one, not 2nd one) survives in grammar and some volcabulary.
Even the AV/KJV is not 17th English as it was silently revised and the original was specially invented English for the translation. People then neither wrote nor talked like that. Shakespeare's text is also specific to the theatre.
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Americans had Daniel Webster to help modernize English.
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It's Noah.
Edit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster
Written by Americans, for Americans in American.
Also he ignored much current usage then and used his own ideas.
Plenty of USA English speakers have never spoken as he dictated. He changed USA spelling. However though the spelling has largely stuck due to the prescriptive approach of US education and the dictionary and 'Spelling Bees' (does anywhere else obsess over those, or even have them?) likely US English has changed and plenty of USA people don't speak his English.
Language is not fixed unless the entire civilisation that used it is dead. Hence pronunciation of Church Latin is nothing like how actual Romans pronounced it.
Chaucer used old fashioned English (c. 1340s – 25 October 1400)
Jane Austin is quite modern in usage and her satire. (16th December 1775 – 18th July 1817)
The famous Victorian British & Irish authors are no less modern (when they wanted to be) than USA ones of the same era.