I didn’t say “sympathetic” was incorrect. Are you saying that the “pathy” in sympathy has a different derivation than the “pathy” in empathy? Don’t they both come from “pathos”, meaning ‘feeling’?
Powers &8^]
It would seem that way to me. But I’m just looking in the “derivations” stuff in online dictionaries. Someone with better info could provide a better answer as to why sympathy has sympatheticos and thus sympathetic, but empathy does not have empatheticos and thus empathetic.
Perhaps sympathy is a much older word than empathy?
Okay, so “empathy” comes from the Greek “empatheia”, while “sympathy” comes from the Greek “sympatheia”. Both use the root “pathos”, meaning “feeling”.
In the 17th century, someone decided we needed an adjectival form of “sympathy” and reached back to the Latin and Greek to find ‘sympathetikos’/’-cus’ and create “sympathetic”.
In the 20th century, someone decided we needed an adjectival form of “empathy” and just added the usual “-c” suffix: “empathic”. A few years later, someone decided that if the Greeks had needed such a word they would have used “empathetikos” and thus coined “empathetic”.
I don’t see any grounds here for calling “empathetic” wrong in any way, just because it’s 13 years younger than “empathic”.
Powers &8^]
