The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized numerous domains, yet these models still exhibit weakness in understanding structured tabular data. Although the growing context window promises to accommodate a larger volume of table contents, it does not inherently improve the model's ability to understand the underlying structure and semantics of tabular data. To bridge the semantic gap between **T**ext and **T**able, we propose **T**n**T**, a table-language model that features multimodal table representations to empower LLMs to effectively and efficiently abstract structure-enriched semantics from tabular data. **T**n**T** also introduces a scalable and efficient training pipeline, featuring novel self-supervised tasks, to integrate abstract tabular knowledge into the language modality. Extensive experimental results on NL2SQL demonstrate a much better table understanding of **T**n**T**, which achieves up to **14.4** higher execution accuracy compared with traditional text-based table representations.