Is 人孔 from English? I was discussing with a friend about the word ``, and I know I read (or was told) that it's taken from the English "manhole", literally juxtaposing the kanji for "man" with that for "hole", since for a while that's what Japanese did, giving a kanji writing to new concept/words instead of just taking them (like with ``); I was unable to find where I read/was told that, though, and searching on Google was unhelpful. I was just able to find that in Chinese the word is different, so it's not a loan from there. Can someone confirm or deny this etymology? Is `` a native word, or does it derive from English? Edit: in the comments Leebo stresses that Chinese is listed in the Wikitionary entry for ``, which I misread in my research.

This is a linguistic phenomenon called " **calque** " or "loan translation". In Japanese, it is called {}.

A calque is a word that has been borrowed from another language by the method of literally translating the foreign word "component-by-component".

This is, therefore, a completely different method from homophonic translation (aka 'katakanization'), which takes the form of, for instance, "manhole" to .

The more 'famous' calques used in Japanese include:

{} from "Eisenbahn" in German (literally, "iron" + "road")

{} from "footnote" in English

{} from "keyboard" in English

Whether {} was calqued directly from English into Japanese or it came via Chinese, it would be safe to label the word as a calque.

By the way, is not a common word **_at all_** in Japanese. It sounds terribly technical. Wonder why you were discussing it.