I have been working for a few days on this and not making as much headway as I would like. I know Franklin M. Liang's hyphenation algorithm implemented in a number of languages. Yet none of these are R.
Even if there was an implementation in R, I am not really sure if it would be doing exactly what I want since I am interested in identifying syllables and not just acoustically and visually appealing locations for line breaks.
My ideal implementation would be the following:
w = c('country', 'someone', 'merely')
syllables(w)
[1] "coun-try" "some-one" "mere-ly"