Is it the UESP board? It's the UESP board isn't it, they take MK way too seriously over there...

*Takes off official hat of the high-priest of truth in Tamrielic religion movement and hides it*

No we dont.

A lunatic could ramble on for hours about things that made perfect sense to him but was gibberish to everyone else. Most people would call his ramblings nonsense, but if we're going to argue semantics, there is no such thing as nonsense, just as there is no such thing as pure, human-made randomness. Everything has a method to its madness. We as a society have to draw the line as to where sense ends and nonsense begins.

Do you understand every last word of the Love letter? Parts of it were made to be understood, and other parts were made to be completely alien, nonsense if you will. Certainly it's not just mismatched letters that don't make words, but a lot of those words, in classic MK fashion, are new and have not, prior to his writing the LL, not been seen. I could scour the LL for every last example of them, including examples of new terminology, such as "Digitals" that hadn't yet been a part of TES literature, but I won't do that. You know what I mean, and until corroborating sources were written with some of those same terms, the LL was an island of sorts.

So no, it's not nonsense. Nothing is nonsense. The LL though, with its high degree of foreignness must seem like nonsense either in its entirety or specific parts to all but its creator. And there are a great many people, I would think, who say they understand it but really don't.

A foreign language is not nonsense. Neither is foreign-sounding language. It is flavor.

And if you don't get all hung up on communication, you can obtain a lot of information from it anyways. You should also get a certain impression of mental image, which is the whole point of the exercise. We're in the business of imagination, not encyclopedias.

Foreign-sounding non-language included for flavor makes no sense, though, and is thus nonsense.

The words dontt have to make sense to do their job, said job being simply looking weird and appearing to have an internal logic that is alien to the reader.

You people are acting like nonsense is a bad thing.

I mean, if it is a bad thing, I guess I didn't get the memo. And neither did Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, and Dr. Seuss.

I never said it was a bad thing. Surrealism's nonsense too.

It's been a long time since I read the Loveletter, but I know that people have successfully interpreted and 'translated' even the Tscaesi creation document, which is far more arcane. I doubt there are entire sentences of the Loveletter which remain opaque to knowledgeable close readers. The presence of individual unidentified words is not important, as every college student in the world knows. Most of the new words can be cross referenced and defined through good guesses (all lore is an educated guess in absense of proof).

Certain passages aren't written with communication in mind, but they can be read and put to use. You don't have to claim deep understanding to get the point, and the point is a very formulaic and concise description of mythical processes. If it was so bizarre, people wouldn't cite it constantly.

Nonsense as it entered this thread was clearly a dismissive judgment, not a description of style.

I don't nearly have time to explain the whole thing nowadays, but there have been pretty good exegeses (to continue the joke in this thread) made in the past. Maybe someone else can help you find one. If you post a section from it that you don't understand, maybe posters who do understand it can help you to. That's what's so great about a forum.

Michael Kirkbride has written works that are not meant to be understood. The Loveletter just isn't one of them.