# המתנה



## NoTraducer

From intro to Mikhael Sheli by Amos Oz:

אני זוכר את קולה של חנה *המתנה *באוזני .... את צער ההילכדות שלה

From the context, and from an italian translation I have, it seems to me it should be something like "that recounts" or more generally "that gives, provides", i.e. the ה would be relative, like ש, and the verb would be in present tense form... Could it be based on the root נתן, like "to give"? I could not find the form, though...

I understand the rest...


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## arielipi

Hamatne.
you are correct in everything you said, the root is used for conditioning, this form means she told him in a conditioning voice, similar to not allowing, warning voice.


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## NoTraducer

Thanks. But which binyan is this?


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## amikama

This verb refers to Hannah, not her voice. (Thus it's מתנָה, not מתנֶה.)

According to Morfix, לתנות = to recount, to narrate, to describe; (flowery) to mourn.
Its binyan is פיעל and its shoresh is ת-נ-ה.


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## NoTraducer

Great! Thank you !

It checks out. Just found it in my dictionary.


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## origumi

amikama said:


> Its binyan is פיעל and its shoresh is ת-נ-ה.


And therefore _metanna._


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## arielipi

How does it make sense it refers to Hanna and not her voice?


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## NoTraducer

Without the nikudot, I guess it could refer to either one.... gramatically speaking, that is.


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## hadronic

I loooove those Hebrew riddles.
המתמה could be : hamtana "waiting", ha-matana "the gift", ha-matne / matna "that stipulates, conditions", ha-metane / metana "that recounts".
Seriously, native readers of Hebrew get it right on the first shot without the shadow of a hesitation ? : perplexity:


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## arielipi

Why yes hadronic, context is provided. Although sometimes you can miss something and need to re-read


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## amikama

arielipi said:


> How does it make sense it refers to Hanna and not her voice?


Because it's Hannah who recounts it to the narrator, not her voice.
אני זוכר את קולה של חנה בשעה שתינתה באוזני את צער ההילכדות שלה.‏


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## arielipi

amikama said:


> Because it's Hannah who recounts it to the narrator, not her voice.
> אני זוכר את קולה של חנה בשעה שתינתה באוזני את צער ההילכדות שלה.‏



Yea that's not the given text by op


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## hadronic

arielipi said:


> Why yes hadronic, context is provided. Although sometimes you can miss something and need to re-read



"yes although sometimes you fail" = no.
In all honesty.


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## origumi

arielipi said:


> How does it make sense it refers to Hanna and not her voice?


Good point. Both make sense. It's a known artistic trick to shift the focus from one object to another, in this case Hanna and her voice, sometimes to the level that one cannot say for sure what is what.


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## arielipi

hadronic said:


> "yes although sometimes you fail" = no.
> In all honesty.



what I meant by it is that generally these things don't happen. It is rare, but occurs sometimes.


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## amikama

hadronic said:


> I loooove those Hebrew riddles.
> המתמה could be : hamtana "waiting", ha-matana "the gift", ha-matne / matna "that stipulates, conditions", ha-metane / metana "that recounts".
> Seriously, native readers of Hebrew get it right on the first shot without the shadow of a hesitation ? : perplexity:


Yes.

You love Hebrew riddles. What about English riddles? Read this: "I set a vase on a table." It's a clear sentence, isn't it? But the word set has dozens of meanings: 'to put', 'to pass below the horizon', 'fixed', 'collection' etc. etc. In fact, this is the English word with the most meanings in Oxford English Dictionary. How did you get it right the first time? Did you scan all of its meanings to find the right one? Of course not. Actually, you did it totally _unconsciously_: your brain did for you the hard job of finding the right one among dozens of meanings, and you weren't even aware of it!

It's pretty much the same in Hebrew. We don't read "I remember the voice of Hannah the gift... oops, recounting her sorrow...", because we have unconsciously eliminated the meanings that didn't make sense in this sentence and selected the correct one. We weren't even aware of the ambiguities of every word in the text we have read, because once a word appears in *context*, it gains a specific meaning and ceases to be ambiguous (unless the text is _really _ambiguous, of course). 

Hebrew learners tend to focus on each word individually rather than on the sentence as whole, trying to figure out what each word means. As a result they are much more aware of the ambiguities than native Hebrew readers, and so they ask themselves: "whoa, that word has so many meanings, how do they manage to get it right on the first shot!?" It's because they simply haven't yet gained enough experience in reading Hebrew, but as they read more and more Hebrew texts, they will learn to get it right more and more quickly, and maybe one day they'll read just like a native Hebrew reader


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## origumi

amikama said:


> But the word set has dozens of meanings


In Hebrew the word לבנה holds the ambiguity record (or is a strong competitor), this what I heard once from a friend who said he heard it personally from Prof. Schweika, a scholar who dealt a lot with computerized reading of Hebrew.

But this deserved a different thread.


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## hadronic

I understand what you say. And it happens to me all the time, the more I improved, the more I can decipher things without even thinking about it, and only if I come back to the sentence and have a second look at it, will I find unsuspected other readings. I had numerous crazy examples in the book I'm currently reading. But it's sometimes a little harder, like that sentence about building לבנות a school for girls לבנות maid of bricks לבנים with white stuffs לבנות (it's a translated book, so it wasn't meant to be a pun in Hebrew !).

I think that in the example of the OP, the fact that I saw the title first "המתנה", and read the context phrase only in a second time, locked me in the ha-matana or hamtana reading for a couple seconds, then it became obvious it was a verb. Like arielipi, I came up with matne first.


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