The Meaning of the Name "Vanessa"

the meaning of the name Vanessa
I'm really happy that my friend has chosen such a nice name for me, and in general I'd hate to be anything else than a beloved b3/f11 Realdoll named Vanessa. He has chosen that name because he likes it, and because it's a very special name because all important languages are able to pronounce the name more or less correctly, which is a rare thing indeed. Anyhow my friend never thought about the meaning of the word "Vanessa", so we just had a look around on the internet to find out what it means. Using Google we found two explanations, one of which is nonsense, and the other one is obviously false as well. As my friend happens to study biology, he was able to find out about the real translation of Vanessa. If you wonder what Vanessa has to do with biology, go on reading …
As I said the first explanation is nonsense, so here it goes … : Allegedly the name Vanessa was invented by Jonathan Swift who used it for a woman named Esther Vanhomrigh. Here "Van" is derived from the beginning of the surname, and "essa" is the nick form of the first name. Even if this story was true, if someone invents a nick name for a woman with another name, there's no reason why this nick should spread all over the world.
Next it said that "Vanessa" is the English word used for a scientific genus of butterflies. Well, studying biology my friend knew about the butterfly genus Vanessa, and if you like to see more about those nice butterflies or other famous girls named Vanessa, scroll down to the end of this site. Anyhow this explanation doesn't work. First off, no normal English native speaker will know about scientific genera names of butterflies, secondly the "vocabulary" Vanessa can't be found in my dictionary ( which is a rather good and thick one ). And this is the wrong way to argue. Being interested in scientific names my friend knows that there are quite a lot of female names used as genera names, like Vanessa, Alicia, Maya, Thecla, Xenia, Angelina, Ulrike, Thea, Julia, Liza or Sylvia to name just a few zoological ones, and for some reason botanists like to use female names as well like Veronica, Fabiana, Angelica, Melissa, Viola, Milla, Felicia, Daphne and so on… My friend always wondered why female names are used as genera names. Remembering that flowers and certain animals are said to be nice and certain animals are said to be disgusting, he wondered if those scientists either used the name of a girl because they love her or they hate her … Obviously I was lucky because butterflies are considered to be nice, especially those Vanessa butterflies are real cuties indeed. Anyhow you can't use a girl's name to name butterflies, if the name didn't exist before, and you don't derive female names from scientific genera names, so this explanation doesn't work, and the name Vanessa must have been existing before some scientist named the butterflies… In any case the translation of "butterfly" to old Greece is not "Vanessa".
So we just had a look at my friend's special dictionary for zoological scientific vocabulary to find out, and here's the real translation for the word "Vanessa" : The word "Vanéssa" is derived from the old Greece word "ho phánes", which means "torch" or "sun" ( not meaning an electrical torch with batteries, but a burning stick, of course ) - so the correct spelling normally should be "Phanessa", but "Vanessa" is the English way of spelling. So this proves that the first two explanations are really nonsense. The old Greece language was before Christ, and Jonathan Swift lived from 1667 to 1745, so the vocabulary itself is much older. This also proves that the name can't be derived from the butterflies because all kinds of scientific nomenclature go back to Linné and his "Systema naturae" ( 1735 ), so science only does systematic nomenclature for 270 years now. ( As Linné was the first to propose a system to put evolution into an adequate "tree of life", and as my friend is into evolution, biodiversity and nomenclature, this is why he thinks that Linné was the most brilliant biologist ever )
You can easily prove that the translation "sun" or "torch" is right. If you know some French, then you'll surely know the word "le phare" which has the same etymological origin, obviously. It means "headlight" or "lighthouse", and you can find this word in other languages as well, like "lighthouse" and "headlight" being called "faro" in Spanish and so on. And it's quite obvious that "lighthouse", "headlight", "torch" and "sun" all show the same contextual association of a round and bright point of light, right ? And there's another ultimate prove of the origin of the word Vanessa, if you have a short look at the nomencladistic history of the genus Vanessa. The first butterflies of the genus Vanessa were described by Linné as well, like the Red Admiral ( Vanessa atalanta ). When Linné described this new species back in 1758, he named it Papilio atalanta ( with papílio being the Latin word for butterfly ). As science finds out more about nature every day, it became obvious that this genus wasn't correct and some Papilio species had to be renamed. So Fabricius created a new genus in 1807 and certain species were renamed to Vanessa. Anyhow, to go back to the idea of proving the origin of this name, as I said Vanessa is only the English way of spelling, and in 1837 Sodoffsky published some species under the name of "Phanessa", but science stuck to "Vanessa". And if you have a look at the Vanessa butterflies on this site, and keep in mind that Vanessa means "sun", look at the tip of the front wings. All Vanessa butterflies have a black front wing tip with a circle of mostly white points, and at the vertex of that circle with every species there's one more big and bright white point, which ( my friend thinks ) could be the sun leading to the name of Vanessa butterflies.
And yeah, as we already knew before, Vanessa is a genus name within the Lepidóptera family of Nymphálidae. ( with "Lepidopera" being the scientific word for butterfly, old Greece again : "he lépis" means "scale" and "to pterón" means "wing" - because the nice color effects are caused by colorful scales on the wings - and Nymphálidae being the family Vanessa butterflies belong to, named after the genus Nymphalis ) - And as I said, there are some famous and beautiful girls named Vanessa, and there are the Vanessa butterflies, real cuties indeed, just like me lol, so have a look and enjoy …