personalityの翻訳漢語「人格」の多義と学術概念形成の特質―― 言語学と歴史学の共同研究の成果 ――

要旨

This paper is a collaborative study of linguistics and history. We aim to elucidate the polysemous usage of the Chinese loanword jinkaku （人格）, which was created as the translation of the English term personality, and to trace its historical background. In contemporary Japanese, the word jinkaku has two contrasting meanings or concepts: (1) the inherent uniqueness of the individual, which should be respected, and (2) an object of moral and social evaluation. The polysemy of jinkaku is not a recent phenomenon but can be traced back to the very stage when this word was created as an academic term in the Meiji and Taishō periods. Linguistically, by analyzing examples of jinkaku found in the magazine Taiyō, included in the Corpus of historical Japanese (CHJ), we clarify how the meanings were established as a common word particularly from the fields of ethics and education. Historically, we examine that the philosopher at Imperial University (current the University of Tokyo) Inoue Tetsujirō used the term jinkaku in the Kantian sense (the concept (1)), while Nakajima Rikizō, who was also a philosopher at Imperial University used it within the framework of social ethics (that is, the concept (2)). In conclusion, the coexistence of these divergent interpretations as academic usages determined the subsequent polysemy of jinkaku.

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