  Language modelling is regularly analysed at word, subword or character units,
but syllables are seldom used. Syllables provide shorter sequences than
characters, they can be extracted with rules, and their segmentation typically
requires less specialised effort than identifying morphemes. We reconsider
syllables for an open-vocabulary generation task in 20 languages. We use
rule-based syllabification methods for five languages and address the rest with
a hyphenation tool, which behaviour as syllable proxy is validated. With a
comparable perplexity, we show that syllables outperform characters, annotated
morphemes and unsupervised subwords. Finally, we also study the overlapping of
syllables concerning other subword pieces and discuss some limitations and
opportunities.
