Jason,
First, it is XAG GAH, '[she] celebrated', not XAGIGAH, 'feast'. The question, of course, it what constitutes a "vowel". A consonant has breadth and may include some faint, involuntary, miniscule vocal aftershocks, depending on its situation in a word. Articulating 'B' by itself I do hear the sound of air resonating in my mouth even as it is being ejected between my spread lips. But in the combination BG the sound of this trailing puff of air is absorbed in the G and it becomes BGADIM to my ear. It is possible that some people hear "something", to wit: "the shortest and quickest to pronounce vowel available to the human vocal system", between the 's' and the 'l' of pensəl because this is how they articulate it. As said, I cannot hear this whisper of the grass, this, audible to some, $IRAT HA(ASABIM. We need to keep also in mind that the distance between hearing something and dreaming of hearing it is very short [I am ignorant of the essentials of the science of psychophonetics, but am occasionally reproached that I hear only what I want to hear]. To convince myself that something indeed hides between the 's' and the 'l' of pensəl I would have to record the word, pass it through an oscilloscope, observe the Fourier wave decomposition of each of its components and analyze its frequency and amplitude content. But I will not do it since I am not interested in this esoteric science of phonetics, which, I admit, should be nevertheless of great interest to scientists working on computer speech recognition.
In any event, this discussion of the microscopic nature of this metaphysical ə is irrelevant to Hebrew. As you know, a Hebrew speaker overriding a schwa does it now by a premeditated, full-fledged vowel and not by an incidental squeak. Thus, the question is if it should be ,BGADIM, 'clothes', or B[E]GADIM, the same as M[E]GADIM, 'sweets, gifts of the earth', is now commonly articulated. I think that the pause in MacCoots is long and deliberate.
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