The Chinese word "犹太" (Yóutài), meaning "Jewish", is formed through a process of phonetic borrowing from a foreign language, where two existing characters are selected not for their meanings but primarily for how their sounds approximate the foreign term, in this case, likely derived via intermediary languages from the Hebrew "Yehudah" (Judah). The characters "犹" (yóu) and "太" (tài) were combined to create a stable, disyllabic unit that captures the auditory profile of the source word, with their original semantic meanings (such as "still" or "similar to" for 犹, and "great" or "extreme" for 太) becoming functionally irrelevant in this specific compound.