Talk:Arhuaco language

this romanization is garbage!!
god, who made this stupid garbage romanization? hate it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Omoutuazn (talk • contribs) 12:56, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Claim of the absence of a personal pronoun system
A paragraph was added citing a magazine article in which Nicholas Ostler is quoted as saying Arhuaco ""seems to have nothing comparable to a personal pronoun system", apparently violating a linguistic universal." This claim is indeed found in the reference (full quote: "Ica, spoken in northern Colombia, seems to have nothing comparable to a personal pronoun system—I, we, you, he, she, it and they. Otherwise I would have thought [that] a linguistic universal."). However, there's no evidence given for this assertion, and other references for Arhuaco do identify personal pronouns (for example, I can find  translated as 'él, ella' and as 'nosotros' in an Arhuaco-Spanish vocabulary).

It seems that Ostler is making a strong claim that's easily falsified, though it's possible that important context for his statement was not passed on to the readers of Scientific American, or there's good reason to believe other sources are mistaken. Given this situation, I would ask for anyone more familiar with the literature on Arhuaco to either add more/better references to support to back up or explain this statement. If more support can't be found, I wonder if it would be best to remove this paragraph to avoid giving undue weight to a description that's hard to support. Nasua Narica (talk) 19:04, 3 April 2023 (UTC)