Hi
Does the word immortable exist in Engish
and what its meaning could be if it’s just a ‘creative’ formation?
I think the word for this is “immortal”.
Let’s break it down:
mort = death
mortal (n) = something that can (will) die
mortal (adj) = fatal
immortal (n) = something that will not die
immortal (adj) = perpetual, never-ending (as in “the immortal soul”)
I suppose you could use immortable, but you’d be adding unnecessary letters.
Other examples:
Apathic/apathETic
Empathic/empathETic
Sympathic/SympathETic
etc.
None of the verb/noun forms of these words include the “-et”:
Empathety
Sympathety
Apathety
etc.
Someone, at some point, included the -et to the adjective forms of these words, and the rest is history.
Hi Tom,
Thanks a lot for the et-explanation. This is really interesting!
In particular, Online Etymology Dictionary gives
etymonline.com/index.php?term=sympathy
About immortable – I just came across the word being referred as a name of a movie (“Immortable” (1988)) and wondered about it’s possible meaning.
Google ‘provided’ some (vague) links, from which I was unable to understand the current ‘status’ of the ‘word’.
That was why I asked.
Thanks again for your interesting answer.
In chess, we have a game played between Anderssen and Kieseritzky in 1851, which is called the Immortal. Many believe that this is one of the best games ever played, hence the name…
both of them would have beaten me in like five moves, or fewer.
Tamara
Sympathetic is the “-et” adjective I’m inclined to accept. “Sympathetic” is so widely used (way more than empathic/empathetic, for instance) that my ear is used to hearing and saying it.
This raises a neat question:
Which came first, the noun or the adjective?
sympathy, empathy, apathy OR sympath(et)ic, empath(et)ic, apath(et)ic?
If the nouns came first, then whoever decided to include the -et was off, IMO, as the -et does not seem necessary in any of them. If, on the other hand, the adjectives came first, then we have to accept them as they are, I suppose.
Tom, unfortunately my current level in English does not allow me discussing the topic you started… 
but… even I can dig up… 
and it’s really surprising (for me) to have found that empathy and sympathy actually have come different ways before getting English words:
sympathy
1579, “affinity between certain things,” from [color=blue]M.Fr. sympathie, from L.L. sympathia “community of feeling, sympathy,” from Gk. sympatheia, from sympathes “having a fellow feeling, affected by like feelings,” from syn- “together” + pathos “feeling”.
[size=92](I already quoted that sympathetic is much older.)[/size]
empathy
1903, translation of [color=blue]Ger. Einf?hlung (from ein “in” + F?hlung “feeling”), coined 1858 by Ger. philosopher Rudolf Lotze (1817-81) from Gk. empatheia “passion,” from en- “in” + pathos “feeling”.
Empathize (v.) was coined 1924; empathic (adj.) is from 1909.
(c) Online Etimology Dictionary
YES! EMPATHIC!
I’ll emphatically use empathic henceforth.