Syllabification

I worked on that script on the English Wiktionary and it's not perfect. It's actually really hard to automatically syllabize words with a script.

I would syllabize that word as "pa‧fi‧lo" and the script was supposed to syllabize it like that. Somebody overrode the script. I corrected it.

The easiest thing to do, and the only way of being sure you agree with the authorities, is to look words up in the dictionary. Some of the hyphenations currently in American dictionaries make no sense at all. For example, the reason that prai-rie and fair-y are hyphenated the way they are seems to be that 150 years ago, the editors of Webster's dictionary thought they didn't rhyme¹; prairie was pronounced pray-ree with a long 'a', while fairy was pronounced fair-ee with an r-colored 'a'.

That said, there are a few hyphenation rules that will let you hyphenate 90% of English words properly (and your hyphenations of the remaining 10% will be perfectly reasonable, even if they disagree with the authorities'). Here they are, in roughly decreasing order of priority:

• Break words at morpheme boundaries (inter-face, pearl-y, but ear-ly).
• Break words between doubled consonants — 'sc' counts here but not 'ck'. (bat-tle, as-cent, jack-et).
• Never separate an English digraph (e.g., th, ch, sh, ph, gh, ng, qu) when pronounced as a single unit (au-thor but out-house).
• Never break a word before a string of consonants that cannot begin a word in English (anx-ious and not an-xious).
• Never break a word after a short vowel in an accented syllable (rap-id but stu-pid).

Finally, if the above rules leave more than one acceptable break between syllables, use the Maximal Onset Principle:

• If there is a string of consonants between syllables, break this string as far to the left as you can (mon-strous).

There are lots of exceptions to these rules:

Sometimes the rules conflict with each other. For example, ra-tio-nal gets hyphenated after a short vowel in an accented syllable because ti acts as a digraph indicating that the 't' should be pronounced 'sh'.

Sometimes it's not clear what constitutes a morpheme boundary: why ger-mi-nate and not germ-i-nate?

Sometimes the pronunciation of a word varies—/væpɪd/ or /veɪpɪd/? Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries agree that both pronunciations are valid, but they disagree about the hyphenation.

And some hyphenations I can't figure out the reason for: the Maximum Onset Principle would suggest pa-stry, but the authorities all agree on pas-try.

¹I believe some American dialects still make this distinction in pronunciation; the editors of Webster's dictionary weren't imagining things.

As you have already found, there seems to be discrepancies from various sources on how to hyphenate "standardize." The main problem is that there is no universal standard on how to hyphenate words, at least in English (can't speak for other languages). Depending on the dictionary or style manual you are using, each could give a different hyphenation variation for the same word.

Syllables

Syllabification is one of, but not the only thing, that can determine the hyphenation of a word in English. Syllabification is determined by the pronunciation of the word, not the spelling, so the pronunciation used is one factor that can alter the hyphenation of a word.

To determine the syllabification of standardize, I am going to use the American English pronunciation as an example:

stændəɹdɑɪz

The first step is to determine which are the consonant phonemes and which are the vowels and vowel-like phonemes, which in this case resolves to:

s | t | æ | n | d | ə | ɹ | d | ɑɪ | z
C | C | V | C | C | V | C | C | V  | C

A syllable can have three parts, the onset, the nucleus, and the coda. The nucleus is made up of the vowel or vowel-like sounds and is a required part of the syllable. The onset is the consonants that prefix the nucleus, and the coda is the consonants that come after.

There are several phonological rules (sonority sequencing principle, phonotactic constraints) that control how to divide consonants between nuclei, but most of them are irrelevant to this question. What we are interested is the maximum onset principle. Without the maximum onset principle, we can determine the syllabification so far as follows:

s | t | æ | n | d | ə | ɹ | d | ɑɪ | z
C | C | V | C | C | V | C | C | V  | C
1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ? | 2 | 2 | ? | 3  | 3

In this case, both d's in standardize are intervocalic consonants, which often sound as if they could be part of either the preceding syllable or the subsequent one. The maximum onset principle states that when the syllabification of intervocalic consonants are in question, the consonant should be assigned to the subsequent syllable, in order to give the syllable the maximum onset possible, i.e. if the d in standard was assigned to the first syllable, as in stand-ard, the second syllable would not have an onset at all, so the d should be assigned to the second.

Following these rules, standardize should be hyphenated as stan-dar-dize.

Etymology

However! English hyphenation does not only take pronunciation into account, it also takes into account etymology. Standardize can be divided into a root word (standard) and suffix (ize), putting the hyphenation divider between standard and ize instead of standar and dize.

Conclusion

Taking both etymology and pronunciation into account, as I believe most would do in the case of determine hyphenation for line breaks, I would personally lean toward standardize being divided as

stan-dard-ize

This takes into account pronunciation for the dividing line between the first two syllables and etymology to divide the second and last.

From a purely pronunciation perspective (and as should be listed in a dictionary), I would break it up as:

stan-dar-dize

Still, as I said, there is nothing governing or enforcing these rules especially in regards to when etymology trumps phonological syllabification, hence the variations you see.

Other Links:

1. LingPipe: Hyphenation and Syllabification Tutorial
2. IPA pronunciation of standardize from Cambridge Dictionary Online
3. Anatomy of a Syllable