syllables - 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:




  1. 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.




  2. 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?




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