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I was discussing with a friend about the word `人孔`, 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 `ミス`); 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 `人孔` a native word, or does it
derive from English?

Edit: in the comments Leebo stresses that Chinese is listed in the Wikitionary
entry for `人孔`, which I misread in my research.
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etymology loanwords
Is 人孔 from English?
This is a linguistic phenomenon called " **calque** " or "loan translation".
In Japanese, it is called 「翻訳借用{ほんやくしゃくよう}」.

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
「マンホール」.

The more 'famous' calques used in Japanese include:

・「鉄道{てつどう}」 from "Eisenbahn" in German (literally, "iron" + "road")

・「脚注{きゃくちゅう}」 from "footnote" in English

・「鍵盤{けんばん}」 from "keyboard" in English

Whether 「人孔{じんこう}」 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, 「人孔」 is not a common word **_at all_** in Japanese. It sounds
terribly technical. Wonder why you were discussing it.
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It's a thing in Mandarin world (Taiwan maybe?) to know several Japan
region(Prefectures/cities) has unique emblem in its manhole cover(マンホールの蓋)
design. As result, the term (人孔/人孔蓋) is a more used Kanji in Chinese instead
of Japanese (人孔蓋 is a fairly common term in Mandarin news report that I
remembered)
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Native Japanese speaker here.

So as @l'électeur pointed out, 「人孔」 would in theory fall under this umbrella
of a calque.

However, in this case, 「マンホール」is far, far more common. In the 18 years I've
lived in Japan, I've heard the word「人孔」exactly 0 times. That's how common (or
rather, uncommon) it is. In fact, you said 「そこの人孔に気をつけてください。」 to someone on
the street, they probably wouldn't understand you.

Just out of curiosity, I looked up「人孔」, and the definition for the word was:
「マンホール」

So yeah, pretty useless word. If you're a foreigner learning the Japanese
language, I recommend you just forget about the existence of the word
entirely.
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