William Cornyn

William Stewart Cornyn (1906–1971) was a Canadian-born American linguist and author, noted for his expertise in Burmese and Russian language studies, as well as for his research on Athabaskan and Burman etymology.

Life
Cornyn was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. In 1922, he moved to Los Angeles where he first found work as a stock clerk, hall boy, and bookkeeper. He lived in San Francisco from 1924 to 1928, working as an insurance clerk, eventually returning to Los Angeles. He married twice: first to Sara Ellen Fetterman on 24 September 1928 (by whom he had son William, Jr.), then to Catherine McKee on 29 January 1937 (by whom he had two sons and a daughter).

He graduated from University of California, Los Angeles (BA with highest honors, 1940), and did graduate work at Yale (AM 1942, PhD 1944), where he served as a professor of Slavic and South East Asian Linguistics and chair of both the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Russian Area Program. Cornyn's research focused on the description of and preparation of pedagogical materials for Burmese and Russian. William Cornyn became a member of the Linguistic Society of America in 1941 while working as an Assistant in Germanic Languages at UCLA. In 1962, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Linguistics.

He died at the age of sixty-four.