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),[2] 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.[1]
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.[3] In 1962, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Linguistics.[4]
Cornyn, W. S., ed. (1957). Burmese Chrestomathy. Washington, D.C.: American Council of Learned Societies.
Cornyn, W. S.; Musgrave, John K. (1958). Burmese Glossary. New York: American Council of Learned Societies.
Cornyn, W. S. (1967). "Burma". In
Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.). Current Trends in Linguistics: Volume 2: Linguistics in East Asia and South East Asia. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 777–781.