What are the syllabification rules for English?
I am trying to break a word down into syllables and am not quite sure how to do it for English. Some problems I face:
The letter-to-sound rules are not one-to-one. As an example, notice that z"ea"l and "ee"l are different in orthography but map to the same sounds.
English has a large number of foreign words incorporated into it, which makes "sticking" to a certain set of rules all the more difficult.
So my question is:
1. Are there any definite rules for breaking a word in English down into its constituent syllables (CV, CVV, CCV etc.?).
2. What is the "gold-standard" (something used by a majority of the community) on this?
The TeX typesetting system (used mostly by mathematicians) incorporates a syllable-breaking algorithm for English. For more information, you can probably ask in https://tex.stackexchange.com/
English syllabification is different from many other languages where you see a C*VN* pattern.
C*VN* = Consonants + Vowel + Nasal
L2 speakers exhibit an accent because they apply L1 syllabification to English words and because of the way they map English CV patterns to L1 monosyllables.
In English, stress, phonotactics and formatives play a crucial role in syllabification. In rapid speech, phonotactics is violated.
Here is a paper by Charles-James N. Bailey of interest: Evidence for variable syllabic boundaries in English.
http://goo.gl/kkQUb
The procedures for determining syllable boundaries can be rather complex. The starting position is to apply what is known as the Maximal Onset Principle. This states that where there is a choice as to where to place a consonant, it goes into the onset rather than the coda, that is, into the beginning of the following syllable rather than the end of the preceding syllable. The principle applies only if there are no phonotactic constraints. These do not allow a syllable to end with a short vowel and they do not allow a syllable to begin or end with a consonant cluster that is not found at the beginning or end of an English word.