James and Michael,
Thanks for the advice. But the question is not articulating the /ə/ but just hearing it. Even listening on a good talking dictionary I hear nothing in 'pencil' but pensl. Possibly 's' leaves a faint, barely audible, trail, and 'l' a similar initial faint burst. Possibly it is indeed "the shortest and quickest to pronounce vowel available to the human vocal system", I just do not hear it, and certainly am not going to deliberately attempt it. In any event, I am not interested in the nano-phonetics of micro-second gaps and milli- decibel sighs. The sound-laboratory science of the ephemerally sonant /ə/ looks to me esoteric and irrelevant to the issue at hand. As I said, when a present-day Hebrew speaker "moves" a schwa he does it forcefully and to the fullest extent of the vowel. The bottom line is that there is in my opinion no such thing as a vocal schwa in Hebrew. I think Hebrew sounds crisper and more esthetic without the extra schwa "NA" E's. I have never encountered an instance where a word is unpronounceable without resorting to a schwa mobile.
I think it is so:
1. The nakdanim placed the schwas to avoid vacancies and block thereby latter unauthorized additions.
2. The meaning of the word schwa appears to me to refer to the fact that the sign is vertical, NICAB, in contrast with the tsere that is SARU(A, 'spread out'. I can hardly believe the often heard claim that the name schwa refers to 'nothing'.
3. The schwa is to be pronounced as the word $WA itself is pronounced, with $ abutting W.
4. Occasionally a thin cleavage is helpful, but never an E. Thus, it should be XAG[ ]GAH, '[she] celebrated', not XAG[E]GAH. If I am not mistaken the English pronounce MacCoots as Mac[ ]Coots, not Mac[E]Coots.
Isaac Fried, Boston University
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