Syllables (which are a unit of spoken language and nothing per
se to do with punctuation or hyphenation) are generally
considered to be governed by something called the Maximum Onset
Principle, meaning that a syllable consists of a vowel at its
centre or nucleus and at its two edges (the onset and coda) zero
or more consonants, with the coda first filled with as many
consonants as the language in question allows. These are the
principles of syllabification and you'll find a few corner
cases. In English, for example, in a word such as "strengths",
it might be argued that the final -s actually functions as a
though it were a vowel, forming the nucleus of a syllable. In a
word such as "university", which intuitively appears to have
five syllables, in actual pronunciation it's not clear that the
"i" really heads a syllable but might in fact get "merged" into
the coda of the previous syllable. Within a language, different
speakers can syllabify some sound combinations differently. For
example, to most speakers fro