The Chinese word "日内瓦" (Rìnèiwǎ) is a phonetic transliteration of the foreign place name "Geneva," formed by selecting Chinese characters whose pronunciations approximate the sounds of the original name—"ri" for "ge/je," "nei" for "ne," and "wa" for "va"—while the individual characters' meanings ("sun/day," "inside," and "tile," respectively) are semantically irrelevant and chosen solely for their sound, following a common Chinese convention for rendering foreign proper nouns.