anlaut, rime, nucleus, coda (11. 226)

Though everyone can intuitively say how many syllables are in a word—until one begins to question oneself like being prejudiced towards a certain pronunciation—and I find myself mostly conscious of them when editing and formatting longer words, particularly German, ones that to be hyphenated to be broken up to fit on one line or not be orphaned on the page—linguists have a challenging time defining what this phonological unit really is and whether it exists at all. Easily enough meted out, with allowances for artistic license, in poetic transcription adhering to a prescribed meter and rhythm and clearly parsed in the dictionary, the practise of actual syllabification is difficult to resolve as the spoken emphasis and stress is often, maybe always at odds with the conventions of orthography.