Seamus Heaney's BEOWULF: Lines 1-85 Read by Paul Meier in Reformed English Spelling

NOTE: The rules of the spelling system demonstrated here have been revised since the publication of this video in order to reduce the frequency of accent marks on vowels. The links provided below, however, all contain updated guidelines and transcriptions.
English is now spoken by over a billion people worldwide, with non-native speakers easily outnumbering natives. Ours is a rich language that has achieved much throughout its history, with its stewards often at the forefront of technology and industry. Yet it remains laden with a hopelessly archaic and non-cohesive spelling system that makes mastery of English literacy much slower and harder than it is in the majority of other European languages.
Restored Latinate Spelling, or RLS, is an experiment in giving English a long-overdue orthographic make-over. It attempts to restore a vowel configuration which is more in sync with the one that pervades most continental European languages (best exemplified by Spanish or Italian). A couple of consonants are also redistributed to represent sounds in a more efficient way.
The captions are bound to look strange or, dare I say, dumb. However, most if not all of that perception will be purely due to your culturally entrenched familiarity with and respect for traditional spelling. A hypothetical generation raised under RLS or a similarly simplified system would probably find the appearance of the very words I'm typing now equally bizarre or ignorant. Please consider instead the intrinsic functionality of these schemes as tools for representing the sounds of a rich and prestigious language.
This material was voiced by Paul Meier, a dialect coach for theatre and film, and a voice-over artist. See all his work at www.paulmeier.com/.
For some lively discussion on the various perspectives on exactly how English should be spelled, I recommend visiting httpː//groups.yahoo.com/group/saundspel/

[@VulcanTrekkie45]

I came up with an alternate version of a modern phonetic English spelling. This seems to be based on Old English orthography, while mine's based off Middle English orthography (which was the last time that the language was truly written phonetically): Dæn'z fiu liit ænd kwik biezh zu foksiz wir jemping long in thy ier oovir ych thin litl dog, bet not with kelosl rum. Goo, leuk hir nou æt my, thænkfl ween Ii shout ynef, foor thie, the slii critirz joyisly foyld yu egeen.

[@TranslatorCarminum]

Shoot! I meant to post my comment as a reply to yours! Anyway, it's there in any case as food for thought. Since you seem rather interested in this topic, might I suggest joining Saundspel (link in the description), where many intriguing debates are had over issues like the one you just brought up?

[@TranslatorCarminum]

It depends on how precise you want to be. Digraphs like 'th' or 'ng' can be confused with sequences of independent letters. A child or foreigner may not know, for instance, that the 'th' in "adulthood" or "anthill" is a separate 't' followed by a separate 'h' instead of the single sound represented above with the unambiguous letter 'þ.' There's also "singer" versus "finger." How is a non-native speaker to know that the 'g' is pronounced independently in the latter but not the former?

[@DwarvenHydra]

Quite honestly, I usually don't even hear a difference between "singer" and "finger", though I know that it's apparently there. If it's really that important, we can add another "g". INS, maybe I'm wrong. I guess there's a reason why I've always preferred Italian and Latin to English. Well, why I've always preferred ANY language to English. Even French is better, even if it doesn't look like it at first. Hungarian is one of the most logical languages I've ever seen as far as spelling goes.

[@DwarvenHydra]

I really don't get the whole "soft c is /s/", while soft g is /ʤ/. It should be either k/ʧ and g/ʤ (come la mia lingua, italiano) or k/s and g/z (like INS which langauge). Which reminds me, it's okay if one letter makes multiple sounds, as that is the case in most languages, so long as the rules for the sounds are consistent and, if needed, there is a backup letter, such as Spanish "c(a/o/u)/qu(e/i)" and Italian "c(a/o/u)/ch(e/i)".

[@DwarvenHydra]

I think...this is going in the wrong direction. There's nothing wrong with digraphs or dipthongs. They're used in quite a few languages, especially the ones where we got English from most, French and German. I only ask that we make it consistent...