So ignoring the lack of quality in what I've written here...

mutual unintelligibility is the metric that's often claimed but unfortunately it's not really a well-defined property

Someone has said mutual unintelligiblity, but moretypically it's different writing systems because linguists are still often focused on the written word for evidence. That's part of how come chinese is a language despite the spoken language being innumerable non-intelligible between them dialects.

Thanks for that, just the kind of thing I was after. I understand the meter that bit more now. I can see why it would take a fair time to write something properly. Not sure even though it's my native language that I understand English enough for this purpose.

I threw it into Paint X and wrote in the stress marks I heard. Suffice it to say that it hardly falls into a stable meter to my ears. Just so we're on the same page, dactyl refers to one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables, right? And hexameter would be six feet of it, so we'd have to have 18 syllables per line, right? So, let's start with a basic syllable count of your quatrain:
>Fourth of April nineteen fourteen, a boy came of age. (13)
>Barely a man when war was declared throughout Europe, (13)
>Like his pals he was anxious to heed the call of king (13)
>And country to enlist in a war to end all wars. (13)
It seems to start with a quartet of Trochees (Fourth of / April / Nineteen / Fourteen), but then ends with an Iamb and a Spondee. The second line again starts with a Trochee, but the "a" is unstressed, which makes it unbalanced with an anapestic vibe that suggests ignoring the first syllable. Third and fourth lines completely unbalance it by starting with unstressed syllables, and neither resolve into stable feet in a clear way.

This is ambitious, though, and having the same amount of syllables in each line does provide a basic structure... it's just not particularly clear as belonging to any specific scansion.

Try some off-the-cuff examples of dactyllic hexameter to try and feel its rhythm:

Off again, on again; softly they always would cry to their gods once more;
Wither and whether the weather would keep to its scheduled plan again.
Over and over the fabric would wither and while away again.
How do we break through the cycle of ever eternal return for now?
Frantically spinning the wheels of a cylotron psychonaut cycling;
Everything coming together yet nothing can finish it now, they said.

Yeah, that's pretty difficult, even if you're not trying for thematic consistency, narrative, or not ending your lines with "again" twice in a row. Not an easy task, but with time and patience you'll eventually nail down what you want... godspeed, OP.

Thanks very much for the response. I was going in for a Homeric style which tends to only have a dactyl in the 5th foot as far as I could tell, so 13 syllables per line was my aim. I suppose I need to read aloud more often as I ended up completely forgetting about rhythm.

Thanks very much again for the help.

Rather than 'a boy came', would the dactyl requirement be filled with 'came a boy' (of age)?

Sorry for shitposting, but in other words can boy act as an unstressed syllable?

Not a shitpost at all; meter is really tricky.

Both "a boy came" and "came a boy" read as anapestic (unstressed-unstressed-stressed) to me; it's not quite so much the word but the phrase that makes it that way, though, and in the context of the original line, it reads as unstressed-stressed-unstressed.

The flow of the line has to be read in full; pulling out any one phrase or word won't necessarily work. For example, the word "nineteen" could read as either "NINEteen" ("there are nineteen cups on this table") or "nineTEEN" ("I can't buy you beer because I'm only nineteen.") It's super-biased and relative to the native speaker's ear, but there's just an unquantifiable issue with rhyme and rhythm that comes from being exposed repeatedly to a certain patois of English that yields an inner-ear of sorts.

So, instead of "Fourth of April nineteen fourteen, a boy came of age," you'd have to restructure the entire line to make it dactylic hexameter. To communicate the meaning, you'd have to play with the content until you can make it fit the rhythm. Try "April of nineteen fourteen: on the fourth, he was finally of age to fight." This reads on both a sentential and poetic level, because it gives the information of the protagonist (are you penning an ode to Tristan Tzara, by chance?) as well as has a flow of "APril of | NINEteen four | TEEN: on the | FOURTH, he was | FIN(a)lly of | AGE to fight," which is 6 feet of dactyllic verse.

So, try just drilling the rhythm into your head by walking around and going "DA-da-da; DA-da-da; DA-da-da; DA-da-da; DA-da-da; DA-da-da" (which would be totally hilarious if it were Tristan Tzara), and then restructuring the information from each line so that it matches. Again, this is not easy, but possible.

I believe in you, OP.

I shall keep on at it. In regard to stresses, I've only got my own ears so will base my rhythm on how I would stress the words in my own accent I suppose. As long as it doesn't sound unnatural to stress one syllable over the other I should be okay right?

I'll be going for either a dactyl or a spondee for the first four feet, a dactyl for the 5th and either a spondee or a trochee for the 6th. Something to mess around with anyway, as you can tell I'm a novice, and that little quat I wrote out up there is the only thing I've ever attempted.

You've given me plenty of food for thought anyway and impetus to continue until I get it right, so thanks (again).

>linguists are still often focused on the written word for evidence
first, linguists aren't the ones who decide what counts as a language and what counts as a dialect. that's politics.
second, linguists almost always value a spoken language over its written form. a lot of the time standard written languages aren't really natural languages; they are often full of artificial contrivances like "don't end a sentence with a preposition" which can literally be antithetical to how natural language works.

>it's different writing systems
spanish and portuguese have almost identical writing systems yet they are considered separate languages. similar situation for norwegian and swedish. the real criterion is political.

of course it's a real language

>when it has an army and a navy
so Icelandic is a dialect of Danish, then?

Presumably Mi'kmaq is also a dialect of... Canadian?

>when it has an army and a navy
>Icelandic is a dialect of Danish
>Mi'kmaq is a dialect of Canadian
this follows from that platitude but it does not accurately describe reality. am I missing something, or is the premise false?