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distinct senses "add <noun> to" and "remove <noun> from"; e.g. dust, seed, stone (or pit)
(Hoad, 1986:334).
In self-antonyms, one sense is often more obscure or archaic, increasing the risk of
misinterpretation when it occurs; for instance, the King James Bible often uses "let" in the
sense of "forbid", a meaning which is now obsolete, except in the legal phrase "without let
or hindrance" and in tennis, squash and table tennis (Calypool,1994:91-92). Also, an
apocryphal story relates how Charles II (or sometimes Queen Anne) described St Paul's
Cathedral (using contemporaneous English) as "awful, pompous, and artificial," with the
meaning (rendered in modern English) of "awe-inspiring, majestic, and ingeniously
designed (Klein and Murphy, 2011：556-557) ."
Sometimes an apparent opposition of senses originates from “assuming the point of view of
a different language in a presumptuous way” (Knowles, 2004：12-13). In Hawaiian, for
instance, aloha is translated both as “hello” and as “goodbye”, but the essential meaning of
the word is “love”, making it appropriate as both greeting and farewell. The meaning is in
fact the same; it is only the occasion that is different (Knowles, 2004：12-13). Latin altus
can be translated "high" or "deep" in English, but in Latin had the single meaning "large in
the vertical dimension". The difference in English between "high" and "deep" is determined by the speaker's awareness of their relationship to some perceived norm. A mountain is
"high" because it is well above sea level, and the ocean is "deep" because it plunges well
below it. Both, however, were altus in Latin. This concept is superficially similar to a few
examples in Italian, such as snow, which is described as being "high", [alta], rather than
"deep", but this is because it is considered to be heaped above the reference level of the
ground, rather than a throwback to Latin (Jiang Shuzhen,2009:47). The adjective,
"profondo" is used instead to describe the idea of depth below a given reference level, so
the sea is "profondo", along with the vast majority of examples in which "deep" would be
used in English. In Italian, "alto mare" means not "deep sea" but "high sea", with the same
meaning as English of "open water beyond territorial limits" (Haiman, 1978：2-3). The tide,
marea, also follows the same pattern as English, being either "high" or "low", depending on
whether it is above or below the mean. However, Italian, French and Spanish all use their
own equivalents of "high" to describe cooking pots, frying pans and saucepans which in
English would be called "deep" (Lin Jiaxiu,1996：375). In English, "tall", as a synonym of
"high", would only be used to describe a pot when its height is considerably greater than its
diameter, and drinking glasses with such proportions are also referred to as "tall" rather than
"deep"(Zhuang Hecheng，2009：297).