동아시아에서 ‘물리(Physics)’라는근대 어휘의 번역과 정착

Abstract

In this article, I examined how the concept of vocabulary called ‘mulri(物理, physics)’ was changed during the modernization period of East Asia through the data of Japan and Korea. ‘Mulri’, which originated in ancient Chinese literature, was widely used in East Asian until the 19th century. In particular, Confucian scholars in East Asia used ‘mulri’ as a broad meaning to cover the principles of the visible and invisible world. It was in Japan around the 19th century that ‘butsuri(物理)’ began to be understood as the concept for the law of nature. In the Edo period, Japanese came to see Western physics through the vocabularies of Latin ‘Physica’, Dutch ‘Natuurkunde’, French ‘Physique’, English ‘Physics’, or ‘Natural Philosophy’. They translated them into various terms such as ‘Kyuri(窮理)’, ‘Kakubutsu(格物)’, ‘Kakuchi(格致)’, ‘Rika(理科)’, ‘Rigaku(理學)’, ‘Kyubutsurigaku(窮物理學)’, ‘kyubutsuri-jigaku(窮物理之學)’, and so on. Even after the Meiji Restoration in 1868, ‘butsuri’, ‘butsurigaku(物理學)’ were translated into various vocabularies. Nishi-Amane called it 'kakubutsugaku(格物學)', and Fukuzawa translated it as 'kyuri(窮理)' or 'kyurigaku(窮理學)'. However, the educational institutionalization of the Meiji government became a decisive moment for 'butsuri' to defeat other competitive vocabulary and to spread as a major translation of physics. In Japan, the term 'butsuri' and 'butsurigaku' began to spread out in the early 1870s as a concept that referred to the concept of scientific inquiry into a field of modern natural science or natural science, breaking away from the confucian meaning. ‘Mulri’, ‘mulrihak’ in Korea began to be understood as a field of modern science by Yu Giljun’s book, Seoyu-gyeonmoon(西遊見聞) in 1895, but he called physics as ‘geokmulhak(격물학)’. ‘Mulri’, ‘mulrihak’ began to be used as a subject of natural science in the Hansung Normal School in 1895, and appeared in the independent newspaper(독립신문) in the late 19th century. By the beginning of the 20th century, Japanese textbooks were translated into Korean, and ‘mulri’ and ‘mulrihak’ were widely introduced in Korea. After that, it seems that 'mulri' and 'mulrihak' spread around the 1910s as a popular vocabularies in Korean society through new novels and magazines.