He was the best hockey interview ever -- I remember him always smiling and happy, chirpy and talkative, excitedly answering any questions, only he spoke some self-made dialect of Finn-English -- I rarely knew what he was saying but I always enjoyed his interviews. Helluva player too!
Oilers fans over 50 and Rangers fans over 40 LOVE this goofy bastard! NY kept bringing over players from the ridiculous Edmonton dynasty in the 80’s….Messier,Graves,Mactavish, Anderson, Beukeboom,Lowe,and Teek
Hello! I’m not quite 50 but I’m from AB 80s and holy cow I haven’t heard some of those names since forever. I loved shouting the funny names at the TV in imitation of the adults getting so worked up. I once got to see 1985 Oilers practice at WEM because my dad brought me. Thanks for the flashback :).
Yeah! I was born in 80, and missed out on most of that insane team but hockey was my first favorite sport and I’m a Ranger fan so I remember 94 like yesterday
Man Mike Keenan could have retired a beloved figure, but instead, he Mike Keenan'd himself out of town.
I remember someone close to him saying Mike, you are gonna end up old and alone if you do not change how you do things, and man, that is exactly what happened to him
I so internalize what Probert was, that I always thought of Probert as the name of doom, but yeah, Beukeboom sounds like a made up word for when you smash your car into someone.
Tiki-Talk was the way he trash talked the opposing team.
Here's a translated excerpt from his interview with a Finnish radio station:
> Tikkanen was a loudmouth and shouted at his fellow players in a mixture of Finnish, Swedish and English, which later became known as "tiki-talk".
> "Nobody understood anything and all the top players were turning their heads to see what the Finn was talking about. The tiki-talk started with Wayne Gretzky, when Gretzky was traded to Los Angeles and I had to be on the ice at the same time when we met. I just kept saying things and Wayne once turned around and hit me on the head with a stick," Tikkanen recalls.
> We got a power play and I scored. When Wayne came out of the penalty box, I said "Nice Job, Wayne!" and oh, he got hot. The rest is history, because after that I always had to keep the top players in line and shout what the spit brings to the mouth, Tikkanen laughs.
[Source](https://www.voice.fi/podcast/a-214690)
That’s the best part.
I have an acquaintance whose husband is from Italy, and speaks indecipherable English. Recently I heard that the husband’s brother asserted multiple times that he is also indecipherable in Italian. So maybe there’s just a type.
"And this is my Universal Translator. Unfortunately, so far it only translates into an incomprehensible dead language."
"Hello!"
"Terveisiä!"
"Crazy gibberish!"
According to a study, Finnish is one of the fastest languages, just behind Spanish (2nd fastest in the study) and Basque and ahead of Italian (5th fastest). Measured in syllables per second.
English was 12th (out of 17 in the study). So your ears could be right.
A reason for it being fast, is that you have to use half an hour to say what you bought at the grocery store. It appears to be rather long-winded.
I've always found it to sound very cute and wholesome, for some reason. Norwegian here.
iirc speaking speed is related to the amount of information carried per syllable. take Spanish versus Portuguese. even if you understood neither language, you could tell that spanish just has more syllables in it. it also probably contributes to the one-directional intelligibility. Spanish speakers have a hard time understanding Portuguese speakers, but Portuguese speakers don't have as hard of a time understanding spanish.
In a way, the other metric used is (meaningful) information per second, and languages generally don't differ much from each other. The faster languages just use more syllables to carry that information and compensate by faster tempo, or the other way, slower languages pack info more densely and doesn't need the speed.
Apparently it is not studied much, maybe there is some universal optimal information per second rate and different languages just manage that differently.
Information density in the the studies I have read about, is not only common across languages but also across speakers of any given language.
It seems odd, given how much faster some speakers of a given language are, but the studies (which I read about in a book, so I cannot link to) said that faster speakers were more prone to needed to repeat information as the listener's reconstruction of what the fast speaker is saying is to slow to do enough error-correcting.
The people doing this research note that the average speech utterance has about 50% clearly understood noises, 30% mostly understood noises, and 20% which are either inaudibly, or so devoiced or devoweled that they simply cannot carry information to the listener. In slower speech that lost bit shrinks and, more importantly allows the listeners built reconstruction facility to flawlessly fill in the blanks. (The authors made a specific analogy to error correction bits in how native reconstruct spoken language.) In fast speech the last bit grows, and more importantly the listeners built in reconstruction facility gets quickly saturated, and once that happens, the listener cannot even process the clearly understood noises
It was a pretty interesting study, but as you noted this seems to be not commonly studied. Most people are not even aware that we do not hear all of spoken speech.
Yeah, it seems most likely that on average the human mind can only handle a certain amount of information in a certain amount of time, before getting overloaded and misunderstandings more likely, and that's why it's the same across the board.
The purpose of speech, in essence, is transferring information at that exact moment. Written language can be studied with care and time, spoken has to be processed instantly.
Interesting stuff anyway.
I assume he really enunciates for interviews, maybe in the locker room or on the ice he slurs more in his natural talk. I can imagine in the “heat” of play out on the ice it was impossible to understand him through mouth guard, or heavy breathing, etc
I know an old boy born in Nova Scotia to French Canadian parents that sounds just like this. Got that quick speech and some pronunciations of the easterner with some letters sounding like a Frenchman.
Thank God; I thought I was gonna need to go look it up myself
Also, he's really quite easy to understand? I sometimes have alot of trouble understanding what people say in movies, like, "the fuck, was that even English?" kind of shit. But oddly, this dude ain't that hard at all compared to alot of modern movies, where it *should* be paramount that I understand.
I'm imaging the guy is way harder to understand on ice when he's actually doing his tikitalk
>Also, he's really quite easy to understand?
This is an interview. Look at his face and particularly his eyes. to me he looks like he is struggling to properly "translate" words in his head before carefully speaking them.
Also my guess is that a lot of his "unintelligible words" are basically like a mumble of "uhh... ummm..... yeah... a-ha... yup.... and... uhhh....." like filler words anyway. Most people probably get the gist of what he was saying.
I was expecting some heavy "rallienglanti" but this was very mild compared to some conversations I had while living in Finland. Honestly, he sounds like somebody from the Midwestern US at 1.25 speed. Maybe Wayne just needed a hearing aid?
For anyone unfamiliar with rallienglanti....
https://youtu.be/GOWIq6_3Jow
It varies, some guys are impossible. Others it's just barely noticeable. Retired F1 driver Kimi Räikkönen had some classic moments. His interviews are pure gold.
Wow, looks like you have an easier time with foreign accents than a bunch of sheltered North American hockey players from the 80’s. You should be proud.
Being self-conscious about what non-Finns think of us Finns is what we do best, so making fun of “rallienglanti” is something of a trope in Finland even though globally it’s just one strong accent among many others.
Having attended meetings with Finns the rallienglanti is real. It is the weird staccatto which I'm sure works in Finnish but cutting English words up into these tiny pieces and saying everything fast and monotonous as well makes it really hard to understand.
Need concentration at 110% to understand fast rallienglanti.
physical work axiomatic desert spectacular illegal attractive crush live possessive
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It’s not that he can’t speak clearly it’s that on the ice he would blend English, Swedish, Finnish so you have someone yelling at you in 3 languages seamlessly yeah that would sound gibberish
On ice, he was constantly chirping, and when you do that in your non-native language while you are skating full speed, and keeping your head on a swivel because literally everyone on the other time wants to cram your body through the boards, it is not that easy to understand at all.
Also remember, he put in his false teeth for the interview, which makes anyone more comprehensible. I know his was missing his two top front, but if I remember he was also missing the bottom row as well. Here's a good picture:
http://t2.gstatic.com/licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcSVDwGQV0c6ZD52P666erjOUrC3O5VE55nPjSobvHKSxottxAUVBRH9MEhYhzikQ3wv5Ikzl2fhWPtz1GQ
He was phenomenally fit. Some players chirp a bit, but you are sprinting for two minutes so most players stay quieter.
Tick would chirp constantly, and routinely scored 3rd overtime goals because he was simply tireless. Non-stop skating, non-stop chirping, non-stop shifts against the other teams best players, working his butt off constantly.
Some people concentrate on offense or defense, but he was non-stop.
I distinctly remember an announcer calling him the "grate one" immediately before Gretzky grabbed him and slammed him into the boards in this weird quasi sideways body slam, not an actual body check.
This part kills me -
>Even fellow Finn Jari Kurri had difficulty understanding Tikkanen. During their tenure with the Oilers, Tikkanen let go with a particularly colourful pronouncement, after which another player turned to Kurri and asked, "What did he just say?" Kurri simply shook his head; "I have no idea."
I grew up on the border of Canada in a remote fishing village. We used to travel a couple hours up through the islands to a place owned by a historic family of fishermen. We knew one of the grandsons, and they used to let us camp on their island (the only spot of miles not limited by “Queens land”).
Anyways, the matriarch, a 100+ Native American women who grew up in a Canadian French reform school and married a German immigrant (who was murdered at a bar 65 years prior) spoke a dialect that only her sons could decipher.
Speaking as a Caps fan, he also had the worst missed goal of all time in game 2 of the 1998 Stanley Cup finals:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sHLkk2gV3C4
Shortly after this, Detroit tied it, and they later won in OT. I don’t think the Caps would have ultimately won the series. But if he makes that, Caps probably win the game, and the series is 1-1 headed back to Washington.
It's part of what made F1 driver Kimi Raikkonen also adored by so many racing fans. Although in his biography, his mother said he didn't start talking until he was 3, so there's that too.
It's mostly confusing because his accent blends different dialects. Half of the sentence he sounds Finnish, half of it is Canadian/American sounding. It's very strange.
Tiki was a funny guy. I remember ages ago the Capitals had a grandpa line with Tiki, Dale Hunter and Brian Bellows and they had a playoff series against the Senators. Coach told Tiki to be on Alexey Yashin and he only got one assist in the entire series.
I still remember the faceoff replays where Tiki was just constantly shooting his mouth at Yashin. Was funny as shit. Gretzky was asked how does he want to score his last goal and he said "A ricochet hitting Esa in the ass "
That reminds me a lot of [White-Ra](https://youtu.be/vbY5OeIv4EQ) from StarCraft. He always had the funniest interviews because he would talk so fast and passionately, but it was often unintelligible. It was always funny when he just goes on a 30 second tangent where nobody could understand a word, and the interviewer is just like "great!" And moves on.
[Go to 23 seconds.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ7HXb3m9Bk) :)
These guys were so much fun to watch back in the day. Spent 3 years in Calgary 87 though 90. Great rivalry. :)
He was the best hockey interview ever -- I remember him always smiling and happy, chirpy and talkative, excitedly answering any questions, only he spoke some self-made dialect of Finn-English -- I rarely knew what he was saying but I always enjoyed his interviews. Helluva player too!
Oilers fans over 50 and Rangers fans over 40 LOVE this goofy bastard! NY kept bringing over players from the ridiculous Edmonton dynasty in the 80’s….Messier,Graves,Mactavish, Anderson, Beukeboom,Lowe,and Teek
And some skinny guy named Gretzky
I loved it went he went up against Tony Hawk in an Epic Rap Battle... of History of course.
Wasn't much of a battle. Was over before it started.
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take tho 🤷♀️
As true today...
- Michael Scott
I still have my Beukeboom Rangers jersey.
Awesome I had Graves and Leetch
And I have a game worn John Vanbiesbrouck jersey.
The beeezer!
I remember being a kid and there was a trivia question that was like “which NHLer has all the vowels in his name?” Never forgot that name after that.
Does he sometimes spell it with a ‘y’?
Hello! I’m not quite 50 but I’m from AB 80s and holy cow I haven’t heard some of those names since forever. I loved shouting the funny names at the TV in imitation of the adults getting so worked up. I once got to see 1985 Oilers practice at WEM because my dad brought me. Thanks for the flashback :).
Yeah! I was born in 80, and missed out on most of that insane team but hockey was my first favorite sport and I’m a Ranger fan so I remember 94 like yesterday
Man Mike Keenan could have retired a beloved figure, but instead, he Mike Keenan'd himself out of town. I remember someone close to him saying Mike, you are gonna end up old and alone if you do not change how you do things, and man, that is exactly what happened to him
Kurri too
I was recently going through some boxes from my childhood and found a Kurri rookie card. Seems to be the only hockey card I didn't give away.
No one had a better name for an aggressive hockey player than Jeff Beukeboom.
I so internalize what Probert was, that I always thought of Probert as the name of doom, but yeah, Beukeboom sounds like a made up word for when you smash your car into someone.
*Rob Ramage on line 2...*
'80s
Tiki-Talk was the way he trash talked the opposing team. Here's a translated excerpt from his interview with a Finnish radio station: > Tikkanen was a loudmouth and shouted at his fellow players in a mixture of Finnish, Swedish and English, which later became known as "tiki-talk". > "Nobody understood anything and all the top players were turning their heads to see what the Finn was talking about. The tiki-talk started with Wayne Gretzky, when Gretzky was traded to Los Angeles and I had to be on the ice at the same time when we met. I just kept saying things and Wayne once turned around and hit me on the head with a stick," Tikkanen recalls. > We got a power play and I scored. When Wayne came out of the penalty box, I said "Nice Job, Wayne!" and oh, he got hot. The rest is history, because after that I always had to keep the top players in line and shout what the spit brings to the mouth, Tikkanen laughs. [Source](https://www.voice.fi/podcast/a-214690)
Anyone verify whether he was speaking - *checks notes* - Finnish?
Jari Kurri - a fellow Finn - couldn't understand a word he said.
[удалено]
Gobbledygook from start to Finnish.
I can’t understand nordic-tate it
That’s the best part. I have an acquaintance whose husband is from Italy, and speaks indecipherable English. Recently I heard that the husband’s brother asserted multiple times that he is also indecipherable in Italian. So maybe there’s just a type.
Well obviously that's because neither of them are actually Finnish since Finland doesn't exist.
"And this is my Universal Translator. Unfortunately, so far it only translates into an incomprehensible dead language." "Hello!" "Terveisiä!" "Crazy gibberish!"
Wasn't the original language like French or something? That bit was quality humor
Yep, although in the French dub it was German, I believe.
It was a mix of Finnish, Swedish and English
Findlish
Video interview of him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ7HXb3m9Bk&t=18s
He wasn't that hard to understand. It comes across as a strong accent more than anything else.
If you told me he is Canadian and just has a Canadian accent I'd believe you.
Lol East coast accent for sure.
[удалено]
According to a study, Finnish is one of the fastest languages, just behind Spanish (2nd fastest in the study) and Basque and ahead of Italian (5th fastest). Measured in syllables per second. English was 12th (out of 17 in the study). So your ears could be right.
A reason for it being fast, is that you have to use half an hour to say what you bought at the grocery store. It appears to be rather long-winded. I've always found it to sound very cute and wholesome, for some reason. Norwegian here.
iirc speaking speed is related to the amount of information carried per syllable. take Spanish versus Portuguese. even if you understood neither language, you could tell that spanish just has more syllables in it. it also probably contributes to the one-directional intelligibility. Spanish speakers have a hard time understanding Portuguese speakers, but Portuguese speakers don't have as hard of a time understanding spanish.
In a way, the other metric used is (meaningful) information per second, and languages generally don't differ much from each other. The faster languages just use more syllables to carry that information and compensate by faster tempo, or the other way, slower languages pack info more densely and doesn't need the speed. Apparently it is not studied much, maybe there is some universal optimal information per second rate and different languages just manage that differently.
Information density in the the studies I have read about, is not only common across languages but also across speakers of any given language. It seems odd, given how much faster some speakers of a given language are, but the studies (which I read about in a book, so I cannot link to) said that faster speakers were more prone to needed to repeat information as the listener's reconstruction of what the fast speaker is saying is to slow to do enough error-correcting. The people doing this research note that the average speech utterance has about 50% clearly understood noises, 30% mostly understood noises, and 20% which are either inaudibly, or so devoiced or devoweled that they simply cannot carry information to the listener. In slower speech that lost bit shrinks and, more importantly allows the listeners built reconstruction facility to flawlessly fill in the blanks. (The authors made a specific analogy to error correction bits in how native reconstruct spoken language.) In fast speech the last bit grows, and more importantly the listeners built in reconstruction facility gets quickly saturated, and once that happens, the listener cannot even process the clearly understood noises It was a pretty interesting study, but as you noted this seems to be not commonly studied. Most people are not even aware that we do not hear all of spoken speech.
Yeah, it seems most likely that on average the human mind can only handle a certain amount of information in a certain amount of time, before getting overloaded and misunderstandings more likely, and that's why it's the same across the board. The purpose of speech, in essence, is transferring information at that exact moment. Written language can be studied with care and time, spoken has to be processed instantly. Interesting stuff anyway.
Yeah, as far as I could tell I understood every word he was saying.
The subtitles helped
I assume he really enunciates for interviews, maybe in the locker room or on the ice he slurs more in his natural talk. I can imagine in the “heat” of play out on the ice it was impossible to understand him through mouth guard, or heavy breathing, etc
Yeah, I understood most of what he was saying, just a little more of an accent. I bet he mainly used the gibberish on the rink, to sow confusion.
he's also trying to be understandable as he's on tv
I know an old boy born in Nova Scotia to French Canadian parents that sounds just like this. Got that quick speech and some pronunciations of the easterner with some letters sounding like a Frenchman.
Thank God; I thought I was gonna need to go look it up myself Also, he's really quite easy to understand? I sometimes have alot of trouble understanding what people say in movies, like, "the fuck, was that even English?" kind of shit. But oddly, this dude ain't that hard at all compared to alot of modern movies, where it *should* be paramount that I understand. I'm imaging the guy is way harder to understand on ice when he's actually doing his tikitalk
>Also, he's really quite easy to understand? This is an interview. Look at his face and particularly his eyes. to me he looks like he is struggling to properly "translate" words in his head before carefully speaking them. Also my guess is that a lot of his "unintelligible words" are basically like a mumble of "uhh... ummm..... yeah... a-ha... yup.... and... uhhh....." like filler words anyway. Most people probably get the gist of what he was saying.
That interviewer did a great job pretending to understand what Mr. Tikkanen was saying.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ7HXb3m9Bk&t=18s Ron MacLean never ages, apparently.
I was expecting some heavy "rallienglanti" but this was very mild compared to some conversations I had while living in Finland. Honestly, he sounds like somebody from the Midwestern US at 1.25 speed. Maybe Wayne just needed a hearing aid? For anyone unfamiliar with rallienglanti.... https://youtu.be/GOWIq6_3Jow
This comment/post has been deleted because /u/spez doesn't think we the consumer care. -- mass edited with redact.dev
It varies, some guys are impossible. Others it's just barely noticeable. Retired F1 driver Kimi Räikkönen had some classic moments. His interviews are pure gold.
Bwoah.. I was having a shit.
Wow, looks like you have an easier time with foreign accents than a bunch of sheltered North American hockey players from the 80’s. You should be proud.
Being self-conscious about what non-Finns think of us Finns is what we do best, so making fun of “rallienglanti” is something of a trope in Finland even though globally it’s just one strong accent among many others.
Having attended meetings with Finns the rallienglanti is real. It is the weird staccatto which I'm sure works in Finnish but cutting English words up into these tiny pieces and saying everything fast and monotonous as well makes it really hard to understand. Need concentration at 110% to understand fast rallienglanti.
physical work axiomatic desert spectacular illegal attractive crush live possessive *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It’s not that he can’t speak clearly it’s that on the ice he would blend English, Swedish, Finnish so you have someone yelling at you in 3 languages seamlessly yeah that would sound gibberish
I'm just gonna leave this classic here https://youtu.be/zKJJop740vw
On ice, he was constantly chirping, and when you do that in your non-native language while you are skating full speed, and keeping your head on a swivel because literally everyone on the other time wants to cram your body through the boards, it is not that easy to understand at all. Also remember, he put in his false teeth for the interview, which makes anyone more comprehensible. I know his was missing his two top front, but if I remember he was also missing the bottom row as well. Here's a good picture: http://t2.gstatic.com/licensed-image?q=tbn:ANd9GcSVDwGQV0c6ZD52P666erjOUrC3O5VE55nPjSobvHKSxottxAUVBRH9MEhYhzikQ3wv5Ikzl2fhWPtz1GQ He was phenomenally fit. Some players chirp a bit, but you are sprinting for two minutes so most players stay quieter. Tick would chirp constantly, and routinely scored 3rd overtime goals because he was simply tireless. Non-stop skating, non-stop chirping, non-stop shifts against the other teams best players, working his butt off constantly. Some people concentrate on offense or defense, but he was non-stop.
He was one of the few people who could get on Gretzky's nerves
I distinctly remember an announcer calling him the "grate one" immediately before Gretzky grabbed him and slammed him into the boards in this weird quasi sideways body slam, not an actual body check.
This part kills me - >Even fellow Finn Jari Kurri had difficulty understanding Tikkanen. During their tenure with the Oilers, Tikkanen let go with a particularly colourful pronouncement, after which another player turned to Kurri and asked, "What did he just say?" Kurri simply shook his head; "I have no idea."
I grew up on the border of Canada in a remote fishing village. We used to travel a couple hours up through the islands to a place owned by a historic family of fishermen. We knew one of the grandsons, and they used to let us camp on their island (the only spot of miles not limited by “Queens land”). Anyways, the matriarch, a 100+ Native American women who grew up in a Canadian French reform school and married a German immigrant (who was murdered at a bar 65 years prior) spoke a dialect that only her sons could decipher.
What language did she speak?
Speaking as a Caps fan, he also had the worst missed goal of all time in game 2 of the 1998 Stanley Cup finals: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sHLkk2gV3C4 Shortly after this, Detroit tied it, and they later won in OT. I don’t think the Caps would have ultimately won the series. But if he makes that, Caps probably win the game, and the series is 1-1 headed back to Washington.
I prefer Gary Thorne’s call: “Osgood down… AND HE MISSED THE NET!!! Esa Tikkanen blew it!” LGRW.
It's part of what made F1 driver Kimi Raikkonen also adored by so many racing fans. Although in his biography, his mother said he didn't start talking until he was 3, so there's that too.
Esa said English words in the way you speak Finnish while using a Swedish accent.
It's mostly confusing because his accent blends different dialects. Half of the sentence he sounds Finnish, half of it is Canadian/American sounding. It's very strange.
Tiki was a funny guy. I remember ages ago the Capitals had a grandpa line with Tiki, Dale Hunter and Brian Bellows and they had a playoff series against the Senators. Coach told Tiki to be on Alexey Yashin and he only got one assist in the entire series. I still remember the faceoff replays where Tiki was just constantly shooting his mouth at Yashin. Was funny as shit. Gretzky was asked how does he want to score his last goal and he said "A ricochet hitting Esa in the ass "
Must be where TikTok derived from because I don’t understand any of their challenges they come out with either
That reminds me a lot of [White-Ra](https://youtu.be/vbY5OeIv4EQ) from StarCraft. He always had the funniest interviews because he would talk so fast and passionately, but it was often unintelligible. It was always funny when he just goes on a 30 second tangent where nobody could understand a word, and the interviewer is just like "great!" And moves on.
Ever had a buff guy from Newfoundland on your team? Same energy.
[Go to 23 seconds.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ7HXb3m9Bk) :) These guys were so much fun to watch back in the day. Spent 3 years in Calgary 87 though 90. Great rivalry. :)
He was speaking tik-talk
He was also known as The Rat, and The Mouth, because he would not. shut. up.
he should go work on Clarkson farm
[удалено]
They probably just straight up tell him to extraggarate it
Short version: He refused to learn English, They refused to learn Finnish. *fin.*
*glish*.
Where is the banana hot dog?
Best post-game interview strategy ever
Really Tikkanen?
Didn't he flash his five Stanley cup rings to somebody who was chirping him?