#when i was telling my family the story in english i pronounced edmond‚ albert‚ valentine‚ and maximilien the english way

[coquelicoq]

one of the difficulties i keep running into in my "read le comte de monte-cristo aloud" project is pronouncing the names of the non-french characters. i need to watch/listen to at least one french-language adaptation so i can figure out what i'm supposed to be doing with these. like, what sounds is "haydée" supposed to represent? it's a greek name, so it's been transliterated into french, but in such a way that it includes an h, which is a silent letter in french, and "ay", which isn't a super common combo. so how are all these francophone characters saying this name??

(i'm also not really sure how the francophone characters would be pronouncing the english and italian names like lord wilmore and peppino (frenchily, or just in english and italian?), but since those languages use the same alphabet as french and i'm familiar with their orthography-to-pronunciation mapping rules, it's not as much of a problem.)

then i need to watch an english-language adaptation so i can remember how to pronounce all the french names in english. when i was giving my multi-day recitation of the entire plot to my family in english, i kept getting confused about how to say dantès because i've said it in french so many times now that i can't remember if in english you change the stress or something. this is a problem because where i'm from if you're speaking english and you need to say a french word in the course of a sentence, you must pronounce the french word the english way (whatever that is; of course it varies word by word) lest you be eternally mocked. can you tell i've never recovered from the times i've tried to order french food items from american menus using french-influenced pronunciation and been given the stink-eye into next tuesday? sorry i saw the accent over the e in crème and assumed we were going for the french vowel. i wasn't trying to be pretentious i promise. please stop acting like you don't know what i could possibly be referring to. it's not like i used the french r sound or something! gimme a break!!