Lingua::EN::Syllable has some interesting (and not very large) code to estimate the number of syllables in a word / passage, but he only claims 85-90% accuracy. Maybe that would be a good starting point for your splitting up algorithm, but I would imagine this would be harder in German than English. I suspect there are so many exceptions in a modern language that you'll need to use a dict lookup at some point.

It occurs to me that 'real' dictionaries usually have a phonetic spelling part, using the Internatial Phonetic Alphabet (with 'metacharacters' showing glottal stops, syllabic parts etc.) - if you could grab a German dictionary, maybe you could write a routine to split this - probably a lot simpler than trying to parse the 'proper' spelling.

Cheers,
Ben.

PS I'd be interested to see it if you did, as this would then presumably work with all languages - Lingua::International::SyllableSplit, maybe :) . Ben.