The Chinese word "拉丁" is formed through a direct phonetic borrowing from a foreign language, specifically to represent the sound of the first two syllables of the word "Latin". The characters 拉 (lā) and 丁 (dīng) were chosen not for their individual meanings ("pull" and "man", respectively) but primarily because their combined pronunciation approximates "La-tin". This is a standard method in Chinese for creating terms for foreign concepts, where the characters act almost purely as phonetic symbols strung together to mimic the source word's sound.