The Chinese word **牙买加 (Yámǎijiā)** is formed through a process of phonetic transliteration, where each character is chosen primarily for its sound rather than its meaning to approximate the pronunciation of the English name "Jamaica." The characters 牙 (yá), 买 (mǎi), and 加 (jiā) sequentially correspond to the sounds "Ja," "mai," and "ca," following common Mandarin syllable mappings. This method is standard in Chinese for rendering foreign proper nouns, resulting in a word that sounds similar to the original while conforming to the phonological structure of Chinese, with the individual literal meanings of the characters (e.g., 牙 for "tooth," 买 for "buy," 加 for "add") being largely irrelevant and coincidental.