Persian to Sesotho: identify what a question asks before preserving its word order
The Persian spelling کی can ask about a person or a time
Persian Online distinguishes ki, who, from key, when. The two are written with the same basic letters, with pronunciation and an optional vowel mark distinguishing them in the lesson. A short typed question can therefore require the surrounding sentence before a translation identifies the information requested.
The lesson’s key āmadid asks when the addressee came. It does not ask who came. A Sesotho rendering that substitutes a person question changes the expected answer from a time to a participant, even if it keeps the coming event. The ambiguity belongs to reading the source, not to choosing a visually similar target word.
Sesotho distinguishes a time question from an actor question structurally
Demuth’s grammatical sketch illustrates o-tsamay-a neng? for asking when somebody goes. In this documented construction the time question follows the verb. Its placement need not resemble the Persian lesson’s question, where the time word appears before the arrival verb. Reordering can preserve the same request for time information.
The sketch handles a question about who wants food differently. It illustrates a passive construction asking by whom the food is wanted and a cleft construction identifying the wanted actor. Those are target strategies for asking about the participant, not evidence that the source suddenly describes food acting on a person.
These examples show why changing only a question word is insufficient. If Persian کی concerns the time of an event, the target should ask for that time. If it concerns the actor, a suitable Sesotho construction may reorganize the sentence more substantially. Keeping the original order at the cost of the target question structure defeats the purpose.
Who is affected is different from who acts
Persian Online’s pronoun lesson illustrates u man rā did, in which somebody saw the speaker. The source distinguishes the person seeing from the person seen. A question about one of those roles should preserve that distinction when the target chooses its construction.
For example, asking which person performed an action and asking which person received it can both expect a person’s name. That common answer type does not make the questions interchangeable. A passive target question can still ask about the original actor, while a misplaced object reading can ask about somebody entirely different.
The same issue arises when an unmarked source کی is read hastily. Before interpreting it as who, determine whether the sentence actually asks when; before choosing a target person question, determine whether the missing information concerns the actor or the affected person. These are two separate decisions.
For Persian into Sesotho, preserve the question’s information gap rather than its visible sequence. The documented time question and actor-question strategies allow different word orders while retaining the event and the answer sought. A useful translation should lead the reader to supply the same kind of information that the Persian speaker requested.
Language references