I was looking for some insight into the farewell greeting ta on The Urban Dictionary just now, and came across this mostly excellent top-ranked answer (adapted slightly, emphasis mine):
A slang word for "thanks."
The word is a result of the heavy Danish influence on the English language. Most people do not realize that the English language's roots are really Danish, in Jutland. Equipped with this knowledge this word is easy to decipher.
The Danish word for "thanks" is tak. In Scotland and upper England it was common to drop the at the end because of the way words were pronounced during the time of Old English and Middle English. Hence the slang word "ta" which should actually be pronounced "TA-k" but over time became "ta".
After reading that, I also remembered reading, when I was in our chat, that Frisian was the closest surviving spoken language to English, and then remembered the Wikipedia article stating that many Danish speakers are able to understand some spoken Frisian. With those facts, I hypothesized to myself that perhaps the Danes influenced both languages, before they had diverged, some very long time ago. Alas, that's all I can venture; though I know a fair bit about more modern influences on English — that is, Latin and Old French — I've haven't really seen this discussed before, which is no small wonder, as it seems that whatever influence the Danes had would have been ancient. It's also pretty strange, as compared to French, because Denmark is a bit aways from England; it's doesn't just have a narrow channel to cross, nor, if I remember correctly, doesn't share as intimately connected royal and noble lines as the French have with England.
So I guess my question is: Are the answerer's bolded words above correct? If they are, can someone offer a nice précis of how we can see this influence of the Danes, and how it came about?
Best Answer
The source you cite seems to confuse two different sources of Danish influence in the English Language: the Jutes and the Danes.
The confusion comes from the fact that modern Denmark and Jutland are today the same place. However it is not certain that the Jutes came from modern Jutland. Let me quote an excerpt of the book "Origin of the English Language - A social and Linguistic History" [p. 53]:
As a matter of fact, the real identity of the Jutes and their place of origin cannot be reliably established just from ancient texts because they contradict each other. Venerable Bede for instance, often cited as a source lived more than 250 years after the Anglo-Saxon migrations. If you hypothesise that the Jutes migrated to Jutland after the 5th century then the Wikipedia article stating that "many Danish speakers are able to understand some spoken Frisian" makes perfect sense. After all, people migration and splitting was quite common in these times. Consider for instance the migration of Goths, splitting and then travelling to Spain, Italy and Russia or that of the Vandals: to Sicily through Spain, Morocco and Tunisia.
Furthermore, as you have rightly pointed out, the distance between the Frisian islands and England is much shorter than the distance between modern Jutland and England. The most convincing observation is that the Jutes are said to have landed in Kent... That is quite possible if they came from Friesland but less likely if they came from Jutland. The Danelaw does lie "in front" of Denmark but Kent surely doesn't.
I do not mean to underestimate the contribution of Old Norse to English; it is instead, well established. One often cites for instance many words in "sk": (sky, score, skirt, skill, scab, scale, scrap), or such important words as get, die, call, egg, raise, take. Nevertheless one has to be careful when ascribing the etymology of an English word to Danes. It could be from Danish influence or it could be of more ancient Anglo-Saxon origin.
As for ta and thank, the origin of thank is believed to be Proto Germanic (thankojan) and was already present in Anglo Saxon English before the Danish invasions. However, the Old English (þancian) and Old Norse (þakka) versions followed parallel evolution paths and met again when Danes landed in Britain. So yes "ta" looks like Old Norse indeed but it caught up because it met an already well established cognate.