Onomatopoeiae

Nor can I approve of the term employed by Torrend : onomatopoetic substantives. Substantives they are certainly not, as they pertain to none of the eight classes and have nothing of the nature of nouns. On the other hand, only a part of them are real onomatopoeiae, i. e. words resembling the sound made by the thing of which they are the names.

Al-Khwarizmi, who follows Al-Farabi's definitions slavishly, introduces but two onomatopoeiae tan and tanna to represent relatively, it would seem, ˘ and ¯.