It may have come up before, but that's not to say the last word's been said on the subject. Whether one cleaves to cleave as a contranym, or would cleave cleave from the contranymic body, so far as I can see no-one on this Board has addressed Tsuwm's question some threads back, namely, are there any other members of the cleave-class.
Cleave, we agree, is two different words, with different etymologies. To cleave as to adhere apparently descends from the German 'kleben'. To cleave as to split seems to be related to the Greek 'glyphein'. How beautiful, two separate words, from different stocks, evolving independently down through the millenia into morphologically identical yet semantically opposed lexical items. It is only, by the way, in the present tense form that this is completely true. The past of 'cleave' in
the sense of to adhere is 'cleaved' or (archaically) 'clave'. The past of 'cleave' in the sense of to split is 'cleft' or 'clove' or 'cleaved'.
Now let's look at let. In the tennis sense, meaning 'to obstruct', it descends from Middle English. In its opposite sense, it is cognate with the German 'lassen', sharing a Gothic ancestor, letan.
Common contranyms are many, but these are the only two I know of in this special class.
