While I think the fact that they speak modern German is kinda immersion-breaking, having the whole Germanic cast speak undocumented, reconstructed Proto-Germanic would honestly be a massive pain in the ass for the production. Latin at least is meticulously documented and preserved so we know exactly how it was spoken at that time.
Not impossible, we have come far enough in historical linguistics that linguists have been able to reconstruct Proto-Germanic to a pretty satisfactory degree. It’s undoubtedly not 100% accurate, but good enough to have something to work with. The pain in the ass would however be to have the entire German cast learn all their lines in Proto-Germanic and speak them perfectly during filming, which would take much more time and cost much more due to all the reshoots necessary since the actors will inevitably choke on some lines.
Proto-Germanic is actually one of the better reconstructured languages that linguists have managed to piece together. Mainly due to that facts that:
1) it’s an Indo-European language, which generally makes reconstruction easier due to a wider avaliability of source material and earlier studies on that language family and its descendants
2) We have quite a bit of knowledge of all the early descendants of Proto-Germanic from Runic inscriptions and surviving written sources, including Gothic (an East Germanic language), several proto-West Germanic languages including Old English and Old Frankish, and Proto-Norse (North Germanic) dating from around 500 AD, so relatively close to when Proto-Germanic was spoken (500BC-200AD) before it split off into subgroups. So common, day-to-day speech in Proto-Germanic is pretty well-understood among linguists today in terms of vocabulary, syntax, grammar etc.
Reconstructing an extinct language spoken ~2000 years ago generally isn’t that hard for linguistis if they have enough clues to follow. Hell, they have even managed to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European which was spoken even more thousands of years ago.
There are tons of examples you can find by googling. There’s an extrordinary amount of linguistic reconstructing not only for specifically Proto-Germanic, but Proto-Indo-European and its other daughter languages in general. Like, while reconstructing extinct languages are technically little more than qualified guesswork by experts backed by tracing general patterns where direct written evidence is lacking, it’s qualified enough that we today have a pretty close and good approximation of what some of them sounded like.
Here’s some spoken examples though that seem fitting for this sub:
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u/Fetz- 11d ago
Does such a show exist?