Persian to Rundi: where can ask about a location or a journey
Persian kojā needs its surrounding predicate
The Texas interrogative lesson lists kojā for where. Another Persian lesson illustrates u az madrese be xāne āmad, he or she came from school to the house. A place question about this journey could concern its origin or destination, whereas a question about the person’s current whereabouts concerns a different relationship.
Rundi translation must therefore preserve what is being asked, rather than treat every where-related phrase as a request for the same kind of address. A particular journey can have a school as its starting point and a house as its endpoint, while the person may now be somewhere else entirely.
Kirundi hé also works within a larger construction
Zorc and Nibagwire’s comparative grammar identifies hé as a locative interrogative and gives ari hé, where is he, as usable in both Kirundi and Kinyarwanda. It also gives ugiiye héehé, where are you going, in both. The question word participates in a different predicate in each example; location and intended movement are not interchangeable.
The comparison with Persian is useful precisely because a short where word does not carry the full spatial question by itself. The translation must retain whether the source asks where someone is or where they are going. Answering a destination question with a current location could fail to supply the information the speaker requested.
The source grammar marks which examples belong to Kirundi and which to Kinyarwanda. For a Rundi result, a nearby Kinyarwanda-only example is not automatically interchangeable. The shared examples cited here provide evidence for the distinction without assuming that every spatial construction has identical form in both languages.
A person’s origin is another distinct reference
The same comparative grammar lists uri uwa héehé, where are you from, among its shared examples. This asks about origin rather than simply the place where the person stands or the immediate destination of a trip. A Persian source with an origin interpretation should not become a Rundi question asking someone to disclose their current location instead.
This is practical in an introduction followed by travel details. A person’s place of origin, the place they have just left and the place they intend to visit may all differ. The Persian az and be phrases in the attested journey example help distinguish the trip’s endpoints; their meanings must remain attached to the correct places.
For this direction, read the Persian question with its predicate and any spatial preposition before choosing a Rundi question construction. Preserve whether the missing information is present location, travel destination or origin. Rundi hé or héehé can appear across those relationships, but the surrounding structure must still ask the same question rather than collapse every place reference into one generic where.
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