Gothic is the oldest attested language of the (East-) Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. The texts date from the 3rd to the 6th centuries AD. Its major source is the Wulfila’s New Testament translation.
Gothic is a synthetic language, with analytical tendencies and SOV word order. Gothic adjectives are an open class. New adjectives can be formed by suffixation.
Gothic uses several valence types for adjectives (regardless of their origin): genitive without prepositions, dative with and without prepositions, infinitive, and accusative with a preposition. Primary adjectives seem to provide more examples of valence, but this is likely due to the scarcity of the corpus, as is the fact that deverbative adjectives are not registered for infinitive valence; many of the adjectives are seen only once in the whole corpus, so they may have these valencies in the language, but not in the text.
An important feature of Gothic is the fact that the texts were translated from Ancient Greek, and thus it can be difficult to distinguish between authentic and calqued features. For example, Gothic has a tendency to form compound adjectives like swultawairþja “dying” that seem to be “legitimate” (it translates Gk ἤμελλεν τελευτᾶν), but words like gumakunds “male” and qinokunds “female” seem to be based on Gk ἀρσενογενής and θηλυγενής.
The valence of the adjectives, however, does not present Gothic as a slave of Greek; for instance, many Gothic adjectives do not exist in Greek; where we see a verb, e.g. σὺ δὲ νῆφε ἐν πᾶσιν corresponds to iþ þu andaþahts sijais in allaim (2 Tim 4:5).
Bibliography:
Lehmann W.P. 1986. Gothic Etymological Dictionary. Leiden, Boston: Brill.
Lambdin, Th. O. 2006. An Introduction to the Gothic Language. Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Ferraresi G. 2005. Word Order and Phrase Structure in Gothic. Peeters.
Bennett W.H. 2006. An Introduction to the Gothic Language. New York: Modern Language Association of America.
Гухман М.М. 2007. Готский язык. Мoskva: URSS.
Dixon R.M.W, Alexandra Aikhenvald. 2005. Adjective Classes. A Cross-linguistic Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.