William J. Gedney
American linguist
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Communications
William J. Gedney's Degrees
- Bachelors Linguistics University of Chicago
Why Is William J. Gedney Influential?
(Suggest an Edit or Addition)According to Wikipedia, William J. Gedney was an American linguist notable for his work on Thai and related Tai languages. Life Gedney was born in Orchards, Washington, and spent his childhood there. He was the son of John Marshall Gedney and Viola Gedney , the descendants of English immigrants. Gedney's father died of pneumonia in 1918, when Gedney was three years old. In 1935, Gedney graduated magna cum laude from Whitman College. After graduation, Gedney lived in Leavenworth, Washington and worked as a high school English teacher. During the summers, he occupied himself seriously with linguistics. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he was drafted into the army in August 1942 and assigned to the Army Language Unit in New York City, where he began to work with the Thai language. During this period in New York he also began doctoral studies in Sanskrit at Yale University as a student of Franklin Edgerton. He completed his PhD in 1947, with the dissertation Indic Loanwords in Spoken Thai. He then moved to Thailand, where he studied Thai language and literature, working with some of the most important scholars of the country. He met Choy Manachip, a native of Ayutthaya Province, there in Thailand, and they wed in 1953. Mrs. Gedney was one of the native speakers of Thai consulted for the Thai grammars written by Richard B. Noss . Gedney was professor of linguistics at the University of Ceylon 1959–60, then in 1960 took a position teaching linguistics and Thai at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was in the English department until a department of linguistics was formed there in 1963. In his early years at Michigan, he helped develop the first Thai language training program for the Peace Corps.
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