Horn (instrument) a mixture of the two, is called a horn section in these contexts. Variations include: As the name indicates, people originally used to blow on the actual horns of animals before starting to emulate them in metal or other materials. This original usage survives in the shofar (), a ram's horn, which plays an important role in Jewish religious rituals. The genus of animal-horn instruments to which the shofar belongs is called ("keren") in Hebrew, "qarnu" in Akkadian, and ("keras") in Greek. The "olifant" or "oliphant" (an abbreviation of the French "cor d'olifant"/"oliphant", "elephant horn") was the name applied in
German horn each with the two sides an octave apart. In the twentieth century German horn makers devised further variations on the double-horn pattern. One of these was the "omnitonic" horn invented by Hermann Prager in 1918 and built by Knopf of Markneukirchen, but its complicated mechanism made the instrument very heavy. A more successful model which added a valve to lower both sides of the instrument by a semitone (from B to A and from F to E) was patented by Paul Geyer of Schwerin in 1924. The extra valve not only made playing difficult passages in sharp keys easier, but