The Chinese word "斯巴达" (Sībādá) is a direct phonetic transliteration of the English word "Sparta," formed by selecting characters whose modern standard Mandarin pronunciations closely approximate the sounds of the source word's syllables—"斯" (sī) for "Spar-," "巴" (bā) for "-ba-," and "达" (dá) for "-ta"—with no inherent meaning related to the ancient Greek city-state being conveyed by the individual characters, which is characteristic of the common Chinese practice of creating loanwords for foreign proper nouns.