The more incomprehensible, the better

I was going through Scott Bakker’s Darkness that Comes Before (cool book by the way, very dark….) when it occurred to me that when it comes to fictional languages in fantasy novels, the more incomprehensible the better.

See, most writers aren’t going to be on the same level as the Almighty Tolkien, who basically invented his languages first, the created the world around them…in most cases what you see in the standard fantasy language is gibberish dressed up to look plausible. So making it as unpronounceable and exotic as possible serves this purpose, since anything with a lot of X’s and letters separated by commas looks so weird that it must be true, at least within it’s context…