Background
Cornyn was born in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Cornyn was born in Vancouver, British Columbia.
He graduated from University of California, Los Angeles (Bachelor with highest honors, 1940), and did graduate work at Yale (Department of Administration and Management 1942, Doctor of Philosophy 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.
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 Los Angeles Cornyn"s research focused on the description of and preparation of pedagogical materials for Burmese and Russian.
He died at the age of sixty-four.
William Cornyn became a member of the Linguistic Society of America in 1941 while working as an Assistant in Germanic Languages at University of California, Los Los Angeles In 1962 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Linguistics.