It would be interesting to know how many languages throughout the world have the 'th' sound - not many I bet.

Perversely, English has two: the hard 'th' as in 'then' and the soft 'th' as in 'thin'.

The Anglo-Saxons had different alphabetic symbols to represent the different sounds (thorn and edth). This caused no end of problems for the scribes who translated Anglo-Saxon documents into Norman-French and back again.

Eventually they chose 'y' to represent both sounds; hence 'ye olde...' etc. (NEVER pronounced 'y' as in 'you').