The word 罗马 (Luómǎ) for "Rome" is formed through a historical process of phonetic borrowing, where two existing Chinese characters were selected not for their meanings but primarily for their sounds to approximate the pronunciation of the foreign name "Roma". The characters 罗 (luó) and 马 (mǎ) individually mean "gauze/net" and "horse", but here they function purely as a sound-representing compound, creating a fixed, dissyllabic unit that captures the auditory impression of the original Latin name as it entered the Chinese linguistic sphere.