On a Mac keyboard, Home is Fn+Left arrow, End is Fn+Right arrow, Page up is Fn+Up arrow and Page down is Fn+Down arrow, and as you said, Delete is Fn+Backspace. The Fn key is at the bottom left of the Mac keyboard, which is diametrically opposed to the top right position of the Backspace key. You need to use your two hands to produce any of these combinations. Also, the arrow keys are half the size of the other keys.
Obviously, this is not a problem for most Mac users. Personally, I've used a MacBook Pro for more than a decade, and I eventually found that so annoying that I bought an external keyboard with full size arrow keys and dedicated Del, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn keys.
MacOS is a lovely desktop OS, even now. I stress "desktop" because you can use a proper full-sized keyboard with Home/End, PgUp/PgDn, Ins/Del, etc and they all do exactly what they should. Apple has built in keymaps for PC keyboards for all the localisations so that I get UK English on a PC keyboard, and then I can swap Cmd and Ctrl so Linux keystrokes work as I expect as well.
And a proper external wired mouse, with 5 buttons and a scroll wheel.
It's lovely.
I sold my Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, and may their new owners enjoy them. I am happy I never need to touch the damned things again. I have a centimetre of key travel and a big fat mechanical click, and it's lovely.
It's laptops that are the pain. There, you have no choice. When I travel with this MBA I take a Lenovo USB keyboard and a cheapo 3rd party Bluetooth mouse, but I still need to fsck around with hubs and external power adaptors and so on and it's a pain. The all-day battery life sort of makes up for it. Sort of.
OK, so I did this recently and it depends a lot on what software you're then running whether it works or not, and whether the keyboard will actually flip some Caps Lock switch somewhere regardless of being remapped.
ctrl2caps tends to break and activate Caps Lock, i.e. capital letters unless Shift is held.
I don't deny that reading Japanese written in kana alone is currently more painful than with kanji. However, it seems to me that the current writing system is a local optimum and not a global one. If people started writing Japanese using kana alone, some adjustments would eventually be made to make it more readable, and the end result would in my opinion be superior to the current kana/kanji combination. The same thing happened with the latin alphabet. We don't use it the same way the romans used it 2000 years ago: we introduced minuscule letters, spacing, punctuation, accents... At the end of the day, Japanese is a spoken language like all other languages, and there are no reasons why a purely phonetic system should not work for writing it.
In a Japanese dictionary, you can find homonym clusters as long as something like 12 words.
Native speakers get confused in conversations and have to refer to kanji regarding which word they mean. Except they don't write down the kanji; they think of a very common word which has that kanji and say things like, "the shō syllable in my word is the same (kanji) as in shōrai".
The vast majority of the Japanese vocabulary consists of word roots made from the combination of two kanji. The language-making itself is not separable from kanji.
Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.
> Japanese is only spoken language like others basically only for small children and idiots. Literate, grown-up Japanese is a written language first.
I seriously doubt that. Literacy levels rose in Japan during the Meiji era and that produced pressure towards simplification of the writing system. Sure, Japan didn't go all the way to a pure kana system or to a latin-derived script, but the reasons are political and cultural (and there is nothing wrong with that) rather than linguistic.
In any cases, you didn't disprove my point, which is that the need for kanji is self-fulfilling. It feels necessary, precisely because its usage prevents the evolution of the phonetic kana system into something useful.
Well, yes? The language is built on kanji. In a 100,000 word dictionary, the vast amount of content is words that someone made up by putting together kanji. It is kanji-first. None of it makes sense when you strip away the kanji, and formation of new words is blocked. Kanji is a cultural cornerstone.
Before literacy, commoners had 5000 word vocabularies cradle to grave. Anything beyond that was the domain of the erudite elite.
> the phonetic kana system
The kana system is quasi-phonetic. It doesn't capture phonetics accurately, like IPA, and has ambiguities of its own.
But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics!
Sure, you can fix all this if you just change Japanese into another language.
> But, again, phonetics doesn't help when twelve words have identical phonetics!
You keep missing the point, so I'll try one last time. Look at a picture of the Rosetta stone. I can read Greek but I find the Greek part hard to read. It's written entirely in capital letters with no spacing and no punctuation. (Maybe there were people like you at the time claiming that hieroglyphs were easier to read than Greek.) Modern Greek still uses the Greek alphabet but it has evolved into something much more readable. The same thing happened to latin.
I claim that the Japanese kana system is stuck in its own figurative Rosetta era. There are no reasons why it could not evolve into something readable and not purely phonetic. With all due respect, I don't consider seriously your argument that Japanese is an exceptional language uniquely based on combination of foreign characters that can only be considered a spoken language by children and idiots. There are arguments for kanji that I find convincing, yours has to be the worst.
As for homophones, why would that be a problem? They are not unique to Japanese! For instance, in French, the only reason why 'a' and 'à' are spelt differently is to make it easier to tell them apart in writing. They are pronounced exactly the same. French has a lot more examples like that, and actually, using wrong spellings for words notoriously makes French much harder to read, even if the spelling is phonetically correct. French writing is not purely phonetic, it's only one way: if you know how to write a word, you usually know how to pronounce it but the converse is not true. Yet, it is still a much simpler system than the Japanese one. Children can fully read at age 6, although writing with few spelling mistakes takes more time.
Lol. Flashback to me having this exact conversation with a new Gaijin-kun アメリカの人 at about his second or third month in Tohoku...32 years ago. "They could just do it all in Romaji and save so much work."
and even today some of my Japanese friends joke with me about how hard 漢字 can be, they laugh because they know its hard for them and admit they wouldnt do it if they had been born anywhere else.
So, it is absolutely baked in and kanji first. without kanji the following tongue twister is indecipherable.
Thank you, thats a fun one. I particularly like the play on niwa and wani.
As for the other premise that modifying the phonetics to accomplish a simplification is based on a narrow view of the reason for retaining kanji literacy... there are important and substantive records for business, legal, and actively functional culture which exist in kanji and require kanji literacy to maintain agreement in society that is one of the differences between Japan and most other places. Who else still operates on contractual obligations from written records of the 17th century? Many current farming leases for large parts of the country are backed with the actual stamped, brush stroke written land records from then, stored at the prefecture on the original papers. Losing the ability to read and write kanji would be detrimental to ongoing cultural stability, and so it will not and should not be entertained by anyone living in that system. People living in a 'for now' mindset are irrelevant to actuality.
> There are uncountably many correct mathematical theorems. Almost all of them can't even be written in symbols.
What are you talking about? A theorem is a statement that has been proved from some axioms. A statement itself is a finite sequence of symbols satisfying some syntactical rules. The set of symbols for set theory, arithmetic, etc is finite, so the set of statements, and a fortiori the set of theorems, is at most countable. Where do you get the uncountability?
I suspect you are confusing theorems and theories. Assuming the set theory ZF (for instance) is consistent, then a consequence of Gödel's incompleteness theorem is that there are indeed uncountably many inequivalent extensions of ZF that are complete and consistent. Also, not a single one of these extensions can be described in symbols in the sense that there does not exist a computer program that enumerates a possible set of axioms for the extension.
As for your general point about arbitrariness, the late 19th century was a period when mathematicians started being concerned with the rigorous formalization of mathematics. Sure, there are some arbitrariness in the particular choice of formalization in the same way that the particular form of a programming language like C is arbitrary. However, the Gödel stuff has nothing to do with that arbitrariness, it is about the limit of formalization itself. The programming analogue is the undecidability of the halting problem. Saying that mathematics are arbitrary sounds to me a bit like saying that an algorithm like Quicksort is arbitrary because you saw an implementation in C and the particular form of the C language is arbitrary. Obviously, if you don't like the C language, you can implement Quicksort in another language. The same is true for mathematics. If some day, somebody finds a contradiction in ZF, or simply a new formalization that people find more convenient, then most mathematics will simply get translated and very little will change.
Obviously, this is not a problem for most Mac users. Personally, I've used a MacBook Pro for more than a decade, and I eventually found that so annoying that I bought an external keyboard with full size arrow keys and dedicated Del, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn keys.