I’m not quite a member of The Orthodoxy, but I am sympathetic in this case. I have studied Algonquian languages on an amateur level anyway, and I saw nothing on this person’s Web page that backed up his assertions.
Let’s run through the numbers. Old Norse:
1 einn
2 tveir
3 þrír
4 fjórir
5 fimm
6 sex
7 sjau
8 átta
9 níu
10 tíu
And now Lenape:
1. nkwëti
2. niša
3. naxa
4. newa
5. nalan
6. nkwëtaš
7. nišaš
8. xaš
9. pèškunk
10. tèlën
Not seeing much in common there. And numbers are very conservative linguistically—if two languages are related you can typically see it pretty easily in their number names.
Just to be clear, I’m not at all dissing the prospect that the Norse made it here. That they did is pretty well established at L’Anse Aux Meadows, and I actually believe that the Irish were here before them—because that’s what the Norse themselves said. But if we’re going to prove that kind of contact, let’s prove it with sound methodology.
Trying to make Algonquin a variation of Norse is as silly as trying to make Chinese a dialect of Latin.
If you were intrigued by Kennewick Man or other similar oddities, you’re not one of “The Orthodoxy”, not even close to ‘quite’.
;-)
The way you get a creole is you start with two or more groups who live in the same environment and who allow their children to play together.
The kids will create a common tongue for future generations ~ at the same time they will make use of parts of words, or restructure entire sentences or idiomatic expressions into new single words.
What you need to do in comparing numbers is figure out if any 2 numbers of equal/comparable value have some of the same sound values. That's because today's language is a rather evolved creole based on words coming from a multiplicity of origins.
I went through your lists and the same numbers share a vowel or a consonant, or a blend.
English numbers rose out of a creole of the German languages of the Angles, those of the Saxons, the French, the Gallo Speakers, and some other unknown source (but probably not any of the Gaellic words for numbers). Today's English number set has barely anything at all in common with the standard German number set ~ outside of sharing a consonant or vowel. We are talking about two modern languages with just about the same amount of time separation you'd find between the particular "Norwegian" involved in the Wallum Olem and today's Algonquin language(s).
About two months ago I went through a standard number set used by the largest Indian tribe in El Salvador and compared it to Japanese.
This was simply to see if the locals down there had developed a Creole (outside of Spanish) to accommodate possible earlier migrations by Japanese crossing the Pacific. (This was just to see if there was modern evidence around of the Japanese who left behind the burial grounds recently discovered in Costa Rica). Lo and behold the modern Indian Creole and modern Japanese have numbers with at least a vowel or consonant in common AND, the Salvadoran creole language shows a uniform vowel shift. (Vowel shifts can happen pretty fast ~ e.g. English shifted in the 1600s from the European standard to the current English standard ~ which has created all sorts of problems for young American chilluns' learning modern European languages ~ they do, of course, say EVERYTHING wrong on the Continent).