The word "亚当" (Yàdāng) is formed through a process of phonetic transliteration, specifically to represent the sound of the foreign name "Adam" into Chinese. The characters were chosen not for their intrinsic meanings (which are "Asia/inferior" for 亚 and "to act as/ought" for 当), but primarily because their combined pronunciation in Mandarin closely approximates the original name. This is a standard method in Chinese for importing proper nouns, particularly biblical and Western names, where the meaning of the constituent characters is typically disregarded in favor of achieving an accurate auditory match.