How would you pronounce the first word in the names of these rustic establishments?
Sadly, the answer is not “Yee,” but boring old “The.”
In Old English, long before we put ‘t‘ & ‘h‘ together to form that breathy-lisp sound: we had a letter called a Thorn. Which at the time, would have been spelled: Þorn.
With the invention of the printing-press, Latin countries did not include the thorn on their type-setting; so replaced it with the nearest-looking character: Y.
This was then replaced with ‘th’ – except in Iceland, where it survives to this day as the 30th letter of their alphabet.
