Speaking, reading, and writing

Tanakh is full of speech: Hashem speaks, prophets proclaim, kings command, people answer, and narrators report what was heard or written. This vocabulary group teaches the families that organize dialogue and quotation. אמר is the default “say” family; דבר can mean speak as a verb and word/thing as a noun family; קרא can mean call, proclaim, or read; שמע ranges from hear to listen and, in some contexts, obey. The source sentence determines the natural English.