Aleksandar Loma, Jasna Vlajic-Popovic: the common slavic *gotov reconsidered

Abstract

After a review of previous attempts to interpret the Common Slavic *gotov 'ready, prepared, finished', Trubacev's etymology, which traces it back to a supine in -t(e)u- from PIE "ga-/ga 'to go', is judged to be the only promising explanation and is further developed by the authors. They assume that underlying the Slavic adjective there is the dative of a protero-kinetic verbal noun and compare the derivation of OInd. participia necessitatis in -tavya-, perhaps also the Greek -, from dative-based infinitives in *-teuei gt Vedic-tave, with the stress originally laid on the suffix syllable, which accounts for the zero-grade root vocalism of the Slavic word.