STRONG EVIDENCE against ALGONQUIN-NORSE WORDS
Let me outline . . . the timing problem.
Work over the last 50 years shows that the Algonquian language family has remote relatives in California, Wiyot and Yurok (a.k.a. the Ritwan languages). So in addition to accounting for whatever the date is for Algonquians, you will have to add additional time depth to include the Ritwan languages. That said, the consensus opinion about the homeland of the Algonquians puts them on the Plateau (eastern Washington, Oregon, and Idaho) at around 1,500 b.c.e. long before any Norse visited North America, and at a time when the Norse were not yet distinct from other Germanic peoples.
(Frank Siebert's 1960's work placing Proto-Algonquians in southern Ontario was shown to be deeply flawed about 20 years ago, but even so he gave a date 3000+ years ago for the protolanguage.) The migration of early Algonquians eastward from the Plateau happened over the course of about 1000 years, with the migrants dropping off groups along the way. First were the Blackfoot who stayed on the northern plains just a few hundred miles east of the homeland. Then the Arapahoans and the Proto-Cree. The Arapahoans stayed on the plains, but the Cree headed north and east.
Next to separate were the Menominee and Cheyenne, who stayed west of the Great Lakes, then the remaining group split in two, probably around 500 b.c.e., one group becoming the various eastern Great Lakes Algonquians--Ojibweans, Sauk/Fox/Kickapoo/Mascouten, Miami/Peoria/Illinois, and Shawnee, and the other becoming the Eastern Algonquians, from Micmac to the varieties in Virginia and North Carolina. The migration history is complex, because the Eastern Great Lakes languages appear to have gotten further east and circled back, and the Eastern languages appear to have split into two groups, one of which came down the coast, while the other cut straight east and through the middle of the first to occupy the lower Hudson Valley, the Delaware Valley, and New Jersey. (There were Iroquoians around the whole time, so some of these migration complexities must have arisen because of the presence of other peoples.)
The point is that the timing of the Frozen Trail is all wrong. (Dr. Richard Rhodes, 2004)
