User:Keadle

William Freeman Twaddell was a Brown University linguist of the 50s and 60s, and President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1957.

Little is known about Twaddell; still less is known about his childhood. Twaddell was born in 1906 in Wisconsin. Neither of his parents had gone to college, so it is not likely that they were people of great means Twaddell studied German at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. His was first published in 1925, an article called "A romanticist appropriately considered : James Branch Cabell, by Carl Van Doren." It was not until his graduate studies at Harvard that he met John Albrecht Walz, then a fellow graduate student, who introduced Twaddell to the field of linguistics. In 1929, Twaddell published his first linguistic work, "New Light on Phonetic Change." A few years later, in 1935, he published "On Defining the Phoneme, " in the collection "Language Monographs," which is described as being a supplement to Language, Journal of the Linguistics Society of America. 1963 he published "The English Verb Auxiliaries."

Twaddell taught for his entire career at Brown University, some thirty years, despite the fact that Brown's linguistics department was extremely frail for the duration of his tenure. Because of this, Twaddell was required to teach more German than linguistics, like so many of his contemporaries. There is no evidence to suggest that this bothered him; based on the preponderance of German work in comparison to his linguistic work, it is evident that German remained his primary interest throughout his career. He was enthusiastically involved at the LSA summer meetings, teaching almost every biennial meeting, beginning with his graduate days at Harvard until his retirement. In 1957, he was sought out by John D. Rockefeller III to lead the English Language Exploratory Committee (ELEC), an organization dedicated to compiling curricula to teach English in Japan. Twaddell, by all accounts, truly excelled in this position, as he had a natural gift for teaching others, which this project demonstrated more than any he had yet undertaken. His accomplishments in this capacity may have contributed to his election to the position as President of the LSA later that year. ELEC remains one of the primary adult English teaching institutions in Japan to this day, though it is now known as the English Language Education Council. Twaddell was not the only American professor involved in establishing ELEC; Charles C. Fries was working with him. Despite having worked together amicably in the past, the ELEC project proved disastrous for their relationship. It remains unclear whether it was their personalities or professional opinions which ignited the conflict, however by 1958, the two had "irreconcilable differences" in both areas, making it impossible for them to work together or even be polite to one another in correspondence. Eventually, Fries demanded that Twaddell resign, and Twaddell complied. ELEC did not accept his resignation, choosing to completely isolate the duties of each professor rather than lose either, but the following year, Twaddell insisted that he could not continue. Twaddell continued to publish until 1976, when he retired from Brown, and in 1982, he died at the age of 76, after which he was never printed again. This, combined with the collapse of Brown's linguistics department, accounts for the scarcity of Twaddell's works today, and for his remarkable lack of fame.

Twaddell and his wife, Helen, had four sons: Stephen, George, James, and William H., whom they raised in Providence, Rhode Island.