History of the Armenian Language and General Linguistics
Periodization
Know the standard periodization: Grabar (գրաբար), the classical literary language fixed in the 5th century; Middle Armenian (միջին հայերեն), attested from the 11th–12th centuries; and modern Armenian (աշխարհաբար), with Eastern and Western variants. The alphabet was created by Mesrop Mashtots in 405, and the 5th century is called the Golden Age of Armenian literature. Armenian is an independent branch of Indo-European, not a dialect of Greek or Persian. General linguistics concepts tested include the linguistic sign, phoneme and allophone, morpheme and allomorph, syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, language family, and the synchronic/diachronic distinction.
Traps
Dates are frequently swapped: 405 for the alphabet, the 5th century for Grabar, the 11th–17th centuries for Middle Armenian. Do not call the modern literary language Grabar. Remember that Western Armenian preserves certain classical distinctions and has a different phonological system from Eastern Armenian.
Worked example
The first sentence written in the new alphabet is traditionally the opening of Proverbs: «Ճանաչել զիմաստություն և զխրատ…». Its language is Grabar, and the form զ- marks the accusative prefix characteristic of classical Armenian. Identifying the period and the grammatical marker is enough to answer a typical attribution question.
Rule of thumb
Anchor every text to a period, a script and a linguistic layer; separate external history (dates, events) from internal history (sound change, analogy, borrowing).