Are there objectively measurable features which make humans perceive a language, by itself, as awe-inspiring and worth of renown?

Question

This scene of Game of Thrones is about Khal Drogo's speech. While watching this video, I feel a very deep connection to the character as a leader, and I'm impressed by him, ready to rise and obey him.

Well, that's just me. Yet when I saw more videos of the Dothraki language, I found out that a lot of people are actually impressed by how glorious and awesome this language is.

I thought maybe there are some objective rules based on cognitive knowledge of our brain and language, that makes a language impress us more than other language. Can it be true? Are there objective facts and sounds that make people perceive a language as awesome and glorious?

Answer 1

There might be a fraction of an answerable question here, which I will set forth, but no realistic prospects for answering it. The question would be "What aspects of pronunciation in an unfamiliar language are most strongly associated by listeners with the evaluation 'awesome and glorious'?" One part of the research would involve constructing conlang samples with various phonetic properties (I'm also assuming, unreasonably, a huge supply of trained bodies to actually produce the speech; or, next-gen Klatt synthesis that doesn't sound like Dennis Klatt). The second part is framing the question: you need at least two choices (e.g. "awesome" and "whimpy", or whatever). Don't think that the choice "awesome" actually means that people think it's awesome, it's just the only alternative to "whimpy".

Actually framing the question is an insurmountable impossibility, in its interaction with the final issue in framing the question: identifying the population. Awesome according to whose standards? Without any qualifications, you'd need to sample young American boys, old American women, old Norwegian musicians, middle-aged Egyptian (Arab) engineers, and so on. I'm betting that the strongest determinant of the "awesomeness" judgement is the native language of the subject. The second strongest determinant would be personal ideological matters that you simply would not code for in the demography survey (how many people out there think Elvish is "awesome"? Anybody?). The population is huge and a valid sample is simply impossible. But wait: what is the Mongolian word for "awesome", and what is the Hmong word for "awesome". You can't ask a Mongolian monolingual speaker if Dothraki is "awesome" – he's just say "Юу мэдмээр байна. Яагаад би энд байгаа вэ?" or something like that. Also, in California speak, "awesome" means "uh-huh", unlike in my dialect where it means "wonderous, awe-inspiring". The premise that words like "awesome" identify an objective emotional reality is just so false.

That's why the question cannot be answered. If you want to narrow down the population to e.g. "undergrads taking a psychology survey class in the UCal system between 2016 and 2020", you might generate some numbers.

Answer 2

The answer is "most likely not". Whatever effect the sounds may have on people's perception (if any; read on "sound symbolism" for more info) seems to be a subtle effect, and easily overridden by cultural stereotypes. For example, the "guttural R" sound [R] is considered by many to be aggressive and barbaric in German (or Tolkien's Black Speech), but exactly the same sound is often considered beautiful and romantic in French (as in l'amour). The same kind of agglutination (gluing together of words) which lead some to consider German "logical", an "engineer's language", was once considered by many to be a telltale sign of "primitive minds" in tribal languages.

Very likely, people find the Dothraki language awesome and glorious because they find the Dothraki awesome and glorious. Khal Drogo's speech and Momoa's delivery (cof and body cof) would give me the chills in any language.

There's one sense that Dothraki may be, I think, said to be "awesome" in a concrete way: Dothraki's not a natural language like English, developed collectively through time, but a consciously created constructed language. As such, its construction can be evaluated and criticized as a work of art. And in this sense Dothraki is certainly impressive: from the phonology (the set of sounds and how they combine and change) to the morphology (the word-pieces and how they combine and change) to the lexicon (the database of words) and syntax (how they fit together) and pragmatics (how the culture makes use of it), everything at every level is carefully designed and fit together convincingly and life-like, all without ever losing sight of George Martin's aesthetic purpose in the narrative. In this artistic, subjective sense, David J Peterson may be said to be an awesome languagemaker, and Dothraki (and High Valyrian etc.) awesome fictional languages.