Questions & Answers about سگ از گربه قویتر است.
Why does the sentence use az here? I thought it meant 'from'.
You are right that az usually means 'from'. However, when making comparisons in Farsi, az is used to mean 'than'. Think of it as saying the dog is stronger starting from the baseline of the cat.
How is the word qavitar formed?
The word for 'strong' is qavi. To make it 'stronger', you simply add the suffix -tar to the end of the adjective. This works exactly like adding '-er' to short adjectives in English.
Why are the words ordered differently than in English? Farsi says 'from cat stronger is' instead of 'stronger than cat'.
Farsi puts the prepositional phrase (az gorbeh) before the adjective (qavitar). A good rule of thumb for comparisons in Farsi is this word order: Subject + az + Noun being compared to + Adjective with -tar + Verb.
Why aren't there any words for 'the' before sag and gorbeh?
Farsi doesn't have a direct word for the definite article 'the'. Nouns like sag (dog) and gorbeh (cat) can refer to a specific dog or dogs in general depending on the context. Here, we translate it using 'the' to sound natural in English, but it could also mean 'Dogs are stronger than cats'.