I think that Faarlund's claim is unreasonable starting from the first step - not to consider the rest.

Structural diffusion, as Sally says, can happen on several levels. Saying that just one of them has the privilege sounds a little bit like blasphemy to me.

I am not qualified enough to comment on the relationship between Norse, Anglic, or other dead languages with English, but what I keep thinking is 'no evidence, no party'.

Wow. Of course German has a split infinitive! "To go" in German is "zu gehen." ("Zu" is also cognate to English "to" in other senses as well.)

To boldly go where no [hu]man has [been] before.
Kühn dorthin( )zu( )gehen, wo noch nie zuvor ein Mensch gewesen ist.

"Der Infinitiv hat in manchen Konstruktionen die Partikel zu bei sich…"
"In many structures, the infinitive is accompanied by the particle zu…"

It may be cognate to many, but manch- means "some".

I suspect that the various now-archaic syntactic features of the King James Version that might seem congenial to a modern Swedish speaker would be at least as congenial to a modern German or Dutch speaker

Correct.

Bilingualism was such a threat to the persistence of English that the English community felt a need to pass a law to forbid English from learning Irish, the linguistic equivalent of a kosher law.

The best part, from today's point of view is how that law, from Dublin, is worded: ITEM ORDINE EST que chescun engleys use la langue engleyse… not a word in English in it! :-)

Even if we assume Norse influence (rather than an unattested Anglian *dréam 'dream')

Perhaps that's exactly what we should assume, given German Traum "dream".

Unfortunately, I don't know what solution biologists have formed for describing species and phyla in bacteria.

It's very simple: they haven't found a solution. People who work on bacteria often use a couple of very simple criteria that aren't very closely connected to phylogeny and… well… one of them is "70 % genome identity or more = same species", which would put all primates into the same species – mouse lemurs and men.

No one doubts that Danish had a strong influence on the development of Middle English from Old English. But the fact remains that there are plenty of words and syntactic structures from Old English that remain in Middle English - Old English did not die off, it evolved.

And Norman French had a strong influence after Danish. This means that Modern English is not a direct descendant of the Danish-influenced Middle English.

Furthermore, there was an intentional expansion of English in the modern period for several purposes. Artistic innovators like Shakespeare created many new words. Scientists and others imported Latin and ancient Greek terms to use as a technical vocabulary.

So modern day English consists of Anglo-Saxon-Jute dialects + Danish + French + Poetical Licence + Latin and Greek.

Which is what linguists believed already. I have never seen any linguist claim that Modern English is a direct descendant of Old English. Our scholar is attacking a straw man that he created.

If you want to have an example of language replacement, you can also look to England. Old English almost entirely replaced the Romano-Celtic dialects that were present in England before the Anglo-Saxon-Jute invasions. But even there, much survived, pushed to Wales, Cornwall, Scotland.

Generally more. Where only two languages are involved, you're more likely to get either stable bilingualism or language shift. (Only in some highly unusual circumstances do you get a truly mixed language like Medny Aleut or Michif.)

@Gabe Ormsby: I doubt if anyone thinks that Frisian is closer to English than Scots, a.k.a. Scots English, is. The question would be whether Scots should be considered a separate language from English; these decisions, in the case of very closely related language varieties, are never straightforward linguistically, because the only linguistic criterion we have, mutual intelligibility, is often not usable: attitudes can and do have a *major* impact on people's judgment of mutual intelligibility. Political considerations, which are (almost?) always in play when such questions arise, muddy the waters and make the decision ultimately non-linguistic. For people who believe that Scots is a separate language, I assume (without any expert knowledge on this question!) that your rubric "Anglic" would include both Scots and English, and that the closest relative of Anglic would then be Frisian.

It seems incredible that such a small number of people would have had such an influence on the language of the country they conquered, unless the native population in the region had been very small and sparsely distributed to begin with. It is possible that the original invaders/settlers were joined in short order by many of their fellow Danes, including both men and women, so that the language continued to be spoken for quite a while within families before the newcomers merged with the native population. Since the languages were very close in structure and vocabulary, there must have been a fair amount of near-bilingualism, with passive understanding on both sides leading to a fair amount of borrowing. Compare this with the situation in Normandy, where the original settlers cannot have been very numerous, but the Norse language did not survive for more than a couple of generations before giving way to the linguistically unrelated French spoken by the majority of the population. (Of course, Norse and French were not totally unrelated as both were Indo-European, but they were not close enough for easy communication).

"English, a West Germanic language whose closest relative is Frisian…"

Every time I see this I think, "What about Scots?"-Is it the consensus, or at least contested, that Frisian is closer to English that Scots is? Or is this a case of the mental boilerplate not having caught up with the elevation of Scots to the level of a fully qualified Anglic language on par with English?