1) An Icelandic name for the French city of DouaiThe Latin form of Douay is Duacum, Doacum, sometimes Duagium, Duwaicum. In Flemish, the city is known as Dowaai (in Icelandic it sounds as Dofæ or Dovæ)
The city was long thought to be the capital of the Aduatucians, a Belgian tribe who were allies against Julius Ceasar. Paul-Emile pointed to the name of the inhabitants of Douai: Duacenses. Could the name Aduatici been contracted in the same way as Atrebates - Arras? It would be more than reckless to merely affirm this. Buzelin notes that; on ancient monuments, the city's name is often accompanied by the word "castrum" (Roman fort): castrum Duacense, Duacum castrurriy castrum Duay, castrum quod Duacus nominatur. Douai was built, according to Becanus, by the Nervians to serve as a boundary against the Atrebates, hence its name Dewake (Derhvrwac). Adrien Scrieck too translates Douai as Dewake "guard-place". Still, all the etymologies presented hitherto are founded upon nothing else than an arbitrary decomposition of a word. It is certain that Douai must an ancient name, but unfortunately, there's a lack of data on its origin. Everything we know about its etymology is found in the following records: abstacts by Colvener of a manuscript belonging to the Church of Saint-Amé: t Anno 665 t Erchinoaldus cum fratre suo Adabaldo pâtre Sancti Mauronti reedificaverunt Duacense castrum et infra castrum, templuniB. Mariae: hic enimlocus antiquitùs fuerat consecratus. From the fact that the brothers Erchinoald (Icel. Jarknaldur) and Adabald (Icel. Aðalbaldur) rebuilt the fortress in the 7th century, we may assume that it must have existed before, during the last times of Roman rule when it was destroyed by foreign tribes invading the Empire.
The name Douai, according to Buuet, resulted from the situation of the city in the proximity of two rivers, the Scarpe and the Sensée: "du-ac" ("two waters") in Celtic, but there is a much simpler original word that would make more sense in a situation like this: douet, douit, which was of wide-spread use, according to Lluet, in the northern languages of contemporary France. Thid toponymical element is often found in Norman place-names and simply points at a river or a canal. It is most probably from this word that the name Doué, a small town in Anjou, situated on the River Layon, originates.
Courlépée states that Douy, Duye, Douaix, Doix, Doué, Doé is an ancient Gaulish word that is encountered on a regular basis on ancient maps, with the following meanings: spring, water-course, river, canal. It is probably this word that gave birth to the name Douay, situated at the banks of several rivers. The specific record that helped along the credibility for the likelihood of this etymology, was the interpretation that was made in the "Cronicles of Flanders", assembled by M. de Smet. In it is made mention of a certain Grandris, son of Lydéric (Lýðrekur), called "Dominus de Rivière quod nunc Duacum vocatur". Judging from this, it appears that a synonymy was made between the words "river" and "Douai". (Translation of the French text on the etymology of Douay, see)http://archive.org/stream/tudestymologiqu01manngoog/tudestymologiqu01manngoog_djvu.txt
Note that his old Celtic word meaning "river" is also the etymological root of the name of the British city of Dover (Icelandicized as Dofrar (Íslensk Orðabók, 1992)), which is derived from the Celtic river-name Dour. It also shares this origin with the Portugese river-name Douro, a name presumably given by the Celtic tribes that inhabited the area before Roman times. The Celtic root is *dubro- (Modern Welsh dwr "water") and its Irish cognate dobhar.
Even if this Celtic word would turn out not to be the origin of Douai, the choice of Dof- in our exonymic construction would always the right one, because we could argue that we based it on the Icelandic phonetical adaptation of the Flemish Dowaai (Dovæ, Dofæ) or Doacum (Dó(v)akúm or Dofakúm),
The ending -acum is seen in many latin place-names of Celtic origin. It means'place of', 'property'. Its origin is Celtic *-ako (compare Breton -eg, Welsh -og, Irish -ach, same thing). The book 'Keltar á Íslandi' (Hermann Pálsson) mentions this Irish suffix.
Examples of Irish-Icelandic personal names having the Celtic suffix:
1) Meinakur (ír. Máenach af máen 'þögull' + ach. CGH. Svo hét írskur dýrlingur Maryt.Don.). Þorkell meinakr er nefndur í Eyrbyggju.
2) Bjaðakr (Stafsetning hér er óvenjuleg, enda tíðkast endingin -ach ekki í íslensku, þótt algend sé í írsku; slík ending í hérlenskum tökuorðum verður -akr í karlkyni og -ök í kvenkyni.
The Irish prefix is normally adapted -akur in Icelandic personal names of Irish origin.
Perhaps the most convincing example is the adaptation of the beverage-name Cognac into Icelandic: Koníak (gen. Koníaks). The place-name Cognac is actually derived from cond (confluent) + atte (hut made of planks), but it has been corrupted and given the same ending as French toponyms ending in -acum, but the actual etymology is irrelevant here, it just shows how French toponyms names on -ac, -acum would have been icelandicized.
This means that the most obvious Icelandic exonym for the name Douai is Dofakur, Dofaksborg (which is pretty close to Latin Doacum). It also sounds a bit similar to Dofnakur, the Irish-Icelandic equivalent of the personal name Dominique (Keltar á Íslandi, Hermann Pálsson), but this doesn't have to be inconvenient.
2) Bíblía- Ritningin: In order to render the term Douay-bible hypericelandic we must use "ritningin" as the second element: Dofaksritningin
