Charles Vallancey

Vallancey, Charles (1721-1812), military engineer and Irish antiquarian. Born in Windsor, he came to Ireland with the British army in 1762 and rose to the rank of General. The journal that he founded, Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis (1770-1804), was devoted to native Irish culture, embracing language, religion, architecture, literature, and law. He never learnt Irish and his philological arguments tended to invoke specious homophones and improbable etymologies. He postulated a Phoenician source for Irish, associating it with the language of the Carthaginians, the Persians, and even the Chinese. In his Grammar of the Hiberno-Celtic or Irish Language (1773), Vallancey took pains to characterize Gaelic as ‘masculine’ and ‘nervous’. Vallancey was a founder-member of the RIA in 1782. He initiated the modern study of ogam with an essay on the Mount Callan Stone in 1785.