Traditional, Oral, Narrator | Vocabulary

0:00- [David] Wordsmiths, welcome to "The Vocabulary Circle." Gather round. It's time to sit around the fire and learn words, and maybe throw pine cones in the fire, but also be responsible around fire because I am technically your teacher for the next three minutes, and we must recognize that safety comes first.

0:18So what am I teaching you about? Well, our three words for this video are traditional, oral, and narrator. I'll go through these words in their various forms and then I'll use them each in a sentence. First, traditional, tra-di-tion-al. It's an adjective and it means done in the same way for a long time.

0:40That -al suffix there makes nouns into adjectives. Music becomes musical, bride becomes bridal, brute becomes brutal. And so tradition, the noun, becomes traditional. Oral, or-al. This is also an adjective and it means spoken. An oral thing is spoken aloud, like an oral presentation or an oral history, which is a kind of history that is told from person to person rather than written down.

1:10Narrator, nar-ra-tor. This is a noun. This is a person who tells a story. If you've thought about stories as being first-person or third-person stories, right? Their point of view, the narrator is that person, the person who goes, "Once upon a time," or, "I was cold that winter morning when a pigeon stole my hat," or whatever.

1:32The narrator is the voice of the story. The verb version of narrator is narrate, which means to tell a story. Now, back to narrator, the -or suffix turns it into a thing-doer. A governor is a person who governs. A detector is a thing that detects. A narrator is a person who narrates.

1:56And there's one more noun form here. Let's squeeze it in over here, it's narrative, which means a story, a thing that has been narrated by a narrator. All right, let's use these words in some sentences, huh? "It's traditional in my family to name dogs after detectives, but that doesn't explain why my dog solves mysteries."

2:16My dog growing up was named Wimsey for Lord Peter Wimsey, who was a detective in a series of mystery novels by Dorothy Sayers. Now, my dog is named Phryne after Phryne Fisher, a detective in a series of mystery novels by Kerry Greenwood. It's a thing that my parents did, and now it's a thing that I do, a tradition.

2:35"I'm pretty good at reading Spanish, but my oral Spanish skills could use some work." This person, speaking to a barber, thinks she is saying, the word "cabello," which means hair, but instead she says the word "caballo," which means horse. Oh no, she has trouble speaking Spanish aloud.

2:54That's what oral language skills are, speaking the language aloud rather than reading or writing it. Last sentence, "The narrator of this story is a thief in ancient Greece," reaching into that man's bag to steal probably some coins. He's the narrator, the storyteller.

3:10The story is from his perspective. He controls the narrative. The fire grows dim, wordsmiths. Our time together grows short, but "The Vocabulary Circle" will be here when you need it, and I'll see you in the next one. Until then, you can learn anything. David, out.