That depends: What are you trying to express?KathTheDragon wrote:What word should I be using, if not productive?
There does appear to be a fairly regular pattern[*] in English by which the suffix -ate reflecting Latin -ātus/-ātum/-āta tends to be pronounced /-eːt/ in verbs and /-ət/ in nouns and adjectives. You can call it a "rule" if you like, but I don't see evidence of it being applied to produce new derivations within English. That's why I would not call it "productive". The productive method for forming adjectives from verbs in -ate seems to be adding -ing (e.g. acculturate (1917) > acculturating (1920)) or -ed (e.g. pixelate (1982) > pixelated (1982)).
[*] Examples of exceptions:
Adjectives in /-eːt/: innate, sensate, ornate, prostrate, sedate.
Nouns in in /-eːt/: chemical terms for salts (e.g. acetate, carbonate, nitrate, sulphate), mandate, reprobate.
Verbs in /-ət/: [no examples]
Insofar as I can see a pattern among these exceptions, it's that they tend to be disyllabic. Trisyllabic reprobrate (as an adjective) and insensate both have regional variants in /-ət/, which, however, don't occur in NA English as far as I can tell. So there might be what Ó Siadhail would call a "minor rule" in your dialect which reduces the vowel in these cases, but that's not the same thing as a productive derivation rule. (Insensate and reprobate don't even appear as verbs IMD.)