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- "תהני, טל!"
53 Comments
"Enjoy" is conjugated here in the female form. But the choice of name does not make it obvious, since Tal is a unisex name. (In fact it confused me because I know more male Tals.)
1942
That is one of the advantages of the Hebrew language. It tells you the gender of the person called Tal! No biases or reading in between the lines.
I was not implying that it was a disadvantage of Hebrew. Just that the authors could have chosen a less ambiguous name.
- 1942
And I thought the name Tal was very appropriate! That way, I had to pay attention to the rest of the sentence rather than rely on my limited knowledge/experience. I assume, you do the same in English when someone talks about Sam, Pat, etc...
Oh don't worry, you don't come across as implying that, at all. There are lots of "ambiguous" names but Hebrew seems to clear that up. Not a big problem.
Except if we were speaking to several women we would need a feminine form also, but maybe that is not generally used (see comments by Ploomich and Carmel-n)
Not neccesarily. There are plenty of times where there's only 1 form for both plural male and female. אילו being a clear example.
- 714
Well, תהנו is indeed the masculine form of the verb. There is also the feminine form תהנינה, which is not commonly used, just like mxchana wrote.
Or te-ha-ne. I think with an "a" it's more by-the-rules. In recent years in restaurants the waiters always tell us "te-he-nu", and, old me expecting "te-ha-nu", I'm a bit irritated.
- 156
actually the correct female-plural form is ,תהננה (but in everyday Hebrew not a lot of people speak that way....)
First of all, originally there is a difference between the prononciation of both letters. The letter ט has a deeper, more guttural sound than the letter ת, and so the two words should be read differently and looked at and treated as two completely different words. Different letters, even if the prononciation is similar, always have an historical background behind them. Since it doesn't exist in English let's just write ט as a capital T and ת as a lowercase t for the moment. Now, even though the difference is not as noticeable in Modern Hebrew, while the name Tal means "dew" the word that you wrote is read as "tel" and means something along the lines of "man-made mound" (for example the name of the city "tel-aviv" literally means "spring mound"). Funnily enough "תל" with the sound "tal" does not appear on its own, but when it is doubled it creates the word taltal which means "curl" (like hair curls). I hope it was helpful and not too confusing!
- 2200
Very good explanation, I should add that Arabic (another Semitic language related to Hebrew) retains the phonetic distinction between the two t's: ت and ط. I also read somewhere that Jews originally from Arabic-speaking countries also tend to pronounce ת and ט differently because of this.
- 688
Excellent! Very helpful. I am wondering if there is any place online where I can hear the two different pronunciations.
- 1782
Not at all Pumbush, this was very interesting. Now I have to figure out the correct way to pronounce both letters. Until now they were only two different ways to spell the same sound. ;0)
No, don't sweat, in modern Hebrew their pronunciation is completely identical.
Literally they say "you will enjoy".
By https://en.wiktionary.org and by www.pealim.com I see:
The hebrew verb for to enjoy has another ethymology as the noun fun
Verb "to enjoy" לֵיהָנוֹת : Root: ה - נ - ה
Future tense, 2nd person, feminine, singular: you f. sg. will enjoy: תֵּהָנִי ~ תיהני tehani
Noun "fun" כֵּיף • (keif) : from Arabic kayf كيف
fem. sing.: נהנית /nehenet/ fem. pl.: נהנות /nehenot/ masc. sing.: נהנה /nehene/ masc. pl.: נהנים /nehenim/
Not sure what you're asking. תהני is 2nd person - the ת at the beginning is a clear sign (for verbs in future tense, often used - like here - as imperative). The conjugation of "I" in future starts with א (for this verb, אהנה /ehane/). But you have to know the verb to know that the ת is a a conjugation prefix, so for now you might want to just accept it...
This is the first 5 lessons, learners are nowhere near the future tense. The י suffix = first person at this stage.
- 714
Sorry, but Yarden is a native speaker and he most certainly is correct. That is future tense used as imperative. It's a common phrase, that's why it's taught in the phrases skill. We are also taught מדבר even though pi'el skill is much further down the tree, and להתראות even though infinitives skill is also a long way down. They are all useful phrases, no matter what the grammar behind them is.
Yarden wasn't understanding what they were asking about. I was merely pointing out that for a learner who knows nothing of tenses at this stage, all they know is that the י suffix is associated with the first person. Yarden gave a great explanation, but I understand why the learner was confused originally and wanted to make it known why they were confused.
I have seen in this course the expression 'Enjoy, Tal!' traslated either as תהנו טל תהני טל What's the difference?
Are you sure you saw "תהנו"?
It can be equally well תהני and תהנה; the first would be used if you wish fun to a woman named Tal, the second to a man named Tal.
The form תהנו is addressing multiple people, so can't work like this. I can imagine one context for תהנו, טל, a context which is esoteric these days: if you write a letter addressed to multiple people, and you conclude the letter with wishing the recipients fun, and then sign with your own name, which happens to be Tal...
