Question

In the mid-twentieth century, historical linguists studying the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family generally contended that Hittite, the best-attested Anatolian language, preserved the archaic morphological structure of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) far more faithfully than did sister branches such as Indo-Iranian or Greek. Under this traditional model, known as the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, Anatolian split off from the ancestral language tree prior to the divergence of all other branches, carrying with it earlier inflectional features that were subsequently lost elsewhere. However, recent reassessments of cuneiform tablets from Hattusa reveal that certain grammatical simplifications in Hittite—specifically, its reduced nominal case system and lack of feminine grammatical gender—do not necessarily reflect an earlier stage of PIE. Instead, comparative syntactic analyses suggest these simplifications arose locally within Anatolia as a consequence of extensive language contact and bilingualism between Hittite speakers and non-Indo-European Hattic populations over several centuries. Consequently, rather than serving as a pristine baseline for PIE reconstruction, Hittite morphology may actually exhibit structural innovations driven by sociolinguistic convergence.

Based on the passage, the author implies which of the following regarding the lack of feminine grammatical gender in Hittite?