You just reminded me of reading a free ebook of Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights and getting frustrated by “cloth” being used as a verb and not being able to figure out its meaning until I got frustrated and gave up on the experience. Only later did I realize it was an OCR error (or post-OCR correction error) and the intended word was “doth” as in “this transcription doth sucketh.”

> We don't have much in the way of recorded speech from that area

We may not have a ton, but do have a lot of news reels and radio broadcasts from the time surrounding WWI. Certainly enough to style-transfer a voice model to plug into the text model.