"If so, then you always have to be aware of your orientation in absolute space, even indoors, at night, and in unfamiliar surroundings, etc."
Well... you don't *really* have to know which way is North... just the speaker and the listener have to agree.
Going back to my Columbus, OH example, I've noticed that some people, when they are giving location directions and pointing out landmarks, they are <whisper>pointing the wrong way</whisper>. I can think of one instance standing outside, and one instance inside a building. From the way they were pointing, they weren't even pointing in a fashion that they were looking at a map with north at the top. They were just randomly oriented. Anyway, my point is that, it doesn't matter wether they were actually pointed at the landmarks, whether their gestures were oriented towards an invisible map in front of them, with north at the top, or whether they were just totally off. As long as they were *consistent* in their turns, I could correct their wrong orientation and understand the directions.
So if you only have cardinal directions to refer to things in space, and, say, it's night, you might just say "the tree on the east", and the listener may or may not understand your meaning. So when they go to cut down the wrong tree, you say "No, the tree on the *East*!" And they say, "Oh, the *other* East";)
Well, I would just default it to have the car slow to a stop to avoid hitting the object. It doesn't matter what it is -- if it's not a car, and it's not part of the road, stop. Alert the driver so that they can make a decision, but still, stop. And, since you have all cars with an assured safe distance, no pile-up.
The car should know the road because there are reflectors or something stationary that defines the road, which it cross-checks against the sonar. The car should know other cars because other cars tell their existance and speed. That way the car knows what another car should look like in the sonar -- where it is, whether it is shrinking or growing.
Well, yeah, aside from keeping non-robot cars out of the way, I think the problems you bring up are addressed in my original proposal.
For the unexpected objects, you have the sonar system. If it detects an obstacle, it would slow to avoid hitting it, and perhaps also alert the drivers (who could decide to navigate through it, say, in the case of a cardboard box).
If the cars maintain a minimum safe distance, a car that detects an obstacle can alert cars behind it to the slow down. That would prevent a pile-up.
Also, each car has a little AI. If it detects the car ahead of it slowing down, it should slow down too, and alert cars behind it. If a car unexpectedly finds itself slowing down, it can signal cars behind it.
So the sonar handles unexpected objects, and unexpected slowdowns of other cars. The cars communicate with each other, so if a car isn't doing what it says it's doing, other cars can react to it.
As long as you have minimum assured safe distance, which might be greater for robot cars than for people, I don't see a problem with unexpected objects.
Well, here are a few problems with your train idea. First off, if one person wants to get off, the whole chain of cars has to stop for just that one person. Secondly, if some people in a car one to go one place, and other people in the car want to go another place, the car has to somehow break up to get the different people to where they want to go. When it does break up, it's stuck in the middle of other cars! The problem is also encountered when one car needs to go to another place from the other cars -- it's stuck in the middle of the cars. It can't get away.
If everyone was all going to the same place at once, the train would be great. However, if *you* are going from your garage to your office, this train of yours is a horrible idea. I think the only way it would work is if you have a lot of 'merge points' where masses of people going to the same place would get together on the same train. But then a person might have to make a lot of different hops from these different merge points to get to where they want to go. It's a big mess.
They might. I've seen it. I do it myself. (In our theoretical example, if the story has the teller heading south in the car, the teller stands facing south, not north).
What does this have to do with linguistic determinism?
"What I think Whorf was trying to say is that words are the way our minds can express and understand concepts. If we don't have a word, but we can express a concept in a language, then the language we use doesn't limit us."
You are right on both counts. What you are missing is that Whorf disagrees with your second sentence -- Whorf would say that language *limits* our expressive ability. Most linguists would argue that language *enables* expression. If there is a concept that we don't have a word or phrase for, we can build it out of lanauge. That's the critical difference. Whorf would have you believe that if it isn't in the dictionary, you aren't aware of it.
Well, I guess you would have to use cops to enforce the robot-only lane. I was thinking if there were some way to prevent regular drivers from entering the lane -- if it were totally fenced off from the rest of the freeway -- but then, how would robot cars get on?
As far as the fast lane, I think letting a car drive itself is the motivator. You could snooze or do work while your car drives. As far as speed, sure, certain places have a fast lane now, but do they get to go 150MPH? If you could go 150 MPH, that would turn a two-hour trip into a one-hour trip.
I don't think I'm misinformed about the nature of the theory. I may have painted it as a more extreme version of linguistic determinism than it is.
As far as the exploding barrels, I got the re-telling from Pinker's _The Language Instinct_. I don't have it in front of me, so I can't cite it, but Pinker is pretty harsh on any version of linguistic determinism. Pinker does re-tell the story of the exploding barrels not as a non-native speaker, but as workers mistaking barrels full of fumes for empty barrels.
Well, I'm stuck at blue. Yes, there are some things that are blue, but you don't need to talk about their blueness. Why would you need to talk about blue veins? They don't stay blue when you cut the body open (whether human or animal), and the are only visible through very pale, white human skin. Blue eyes are an extreme rarity in most of the world -- that doesn't explain why some Indians in South America would have a word for blue if they have only 7 color words. Nobody has blue eyes in that tribe -- it's unheard of, unimaginable. I could maybe see blue skies -- you would talk about blue skies to contrast it with bad weather. If you have blue skies, that means that the sky isn't dark and stormy. But then, you could just say "nice weather" or "sunny".
And then after that, I have no guess as to why it would follow any order. I don't think it would be something in the natural world that causes that order, but just something particular in the evolution of the human mind that makes this particular order.
In the back of the book, Berlin and Kay talk extensively about Russian's two words for blue. It's been a while since I read it, so I don't remember whether they talk about pink and purple.
Well, here in Columbus Oh, if you ask someone for driving directions, they will usually rotate their bodies to cardinal directions with each turn in the directions. I do it myself. Or, if you are in limited space, you point your body to the final destination, and then use your arm or hand to indicate the cardinal direction turns.
And besides, if you are capable of saying it, doesn't that require you to be capable of *thinking* it in the first place, or am I missing the point here?
Numbers are a special case. We spend a long time teaching children how to count properly in public schools. They've known 1 through 10 since they were 3 years old, but they still can't use them properly until like the 3rd or 4th grade. It's not a matter of language, is a matter of concept and understanding.
Well, I think it could work with a slow implementation. For instance, these special robot cars work just like regular cars when they are not on a robot road. Then, you have special robot lanes in popular, heavily used highways. This might be in, say, California, where you have a wealthy population that has to travel long distances to get places. In the robot lanes, you get to go like 150 mph -- so that there is a great benefit for you to spend extra to buy a robot car.
Then, there are more robot cars in the fleet, so they build more robot lanes. It creates a positive feedback loop.
"IANANL, but as I understand the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, on a basic level, it essentially stipulated that thought and language were interdependant. "
Nope. It says that language *is* thought -- that's what was so gripping about it when it came out. Most everybody agrees that language and though were interdependent. Sapir-Whorf says No, language is thought. There are no mental movies. It's all language. If you say "The barrel is empty" then you *think* that the barrel is empty, regardless of what you see.
That's really interesting. In the back of the book, they go over their different source languages. I don't remember if they said anything about Japanese.
One interesting discussion was Russian -- it clearly has two seperate words for blue. They hypothesized that dark blue (or light blue) might be the "12 word".
I've been trying to figure out why there would be this order for words. The first few are easy to make up a reason for -- black and white, light and dark, used for contrasting. Red is a common indicator that plants use for ripe fruit. I spent a field study in the jungle one summer, and any red berries would jump out in the midst of the sea of green and brown. OK, so red is an obvious standout color in the woods. Then, you can use yellow/green to contrast with other plants, plants and berries, unripe fruit, etc.
After that it gets harder. I guess I can explain the above order of colors because you might need to contrast things in the environment. However, blue, while it is the color of the sky, doesn't need to be contrasted by color. You can just say "sky" to contrast it from anything on Earth. The rest of the colors are a total mystery to me. Obviously, more trade would expose you to more colors, but as to *why* it would follow that particular order... I don't know. Maybe that part of the theory is bunk;)
Well, I haven't encoutered any of the weak forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Sorry I am undereducated;)
I didn't understand the point of the article you linked to. Was it that the speakers described in the article use absolute cardinal direction when talking about movement in space? If that's so, isn't that just like saying "on its east side" instead of "on starboard", just using seperate words instead of inflections?
I've heard several scenarios where some language has some kind of information in an inflection or conjugation that is an optional word or phrase in English. IIRC there is some Native American language where you always specify the 'handedness' of a bit of knowledge -- I experienced it, I saw it, I saw the results of it, I heard it from the source, I heard it second-hand, or It is common knowledge. I guess the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that since use of this language requires you to use these inflections, the perception of reality is different than for speakers whose inclusion of that information is optional... is that correct?
I also notice that English speakers *do* use absolute cardinal directions when describe locations in space (at least here in Columbus, OH) -- they point with their hands.
How hard would it be to make a robot car freeway? City and country streets would have too much ambiguity for a computer to make sense of, with the sidewalks and ditches and lamposts, etc. but I think the controlled environment of the freeway would be ideal.
Here's what I'm thinking:
Cars have a sonar system for basic navigation. Assume that all roadways have a "gentle" curve path that you can follow if you maintain proper speeds.
Cars have a light-sensor system that detects special reflectors on the roadway. This is a double-check for the sonar system.
Cars are 'smart' and communicate their plans to one another. Each car does some checking to make sure others cars aren't 'rogue' (i.e. saying one thing and doing another) or broken (i.e. not making sense, driving erratically, etc).
There are also smart towers, which are controlled by whatever local highway authorities, which tell cars to slow down, warn of upcoming obstacles, etc. Cars can also report bad cars and ambiguous roadways (ones that don't have proper reflective guides, e.g.) for repair.
I think that this system, as long as it had *only* robot cars, and no human drivers, would work.
Do you think there is some part of the brain/mind that believes that it *is* a unitary consciousness? I mean, even thought I understand that there are different parts of my body and consciousness that do things that I'm unaware of, I still *feel* like a single, global consciousness.
There's no way that Sapir Whorf can be true. If it were, that means that, just off the top of my head, we couldn't lie, entertain theoretical possibilities, hear two sides of the same event, understand that we were misinformed earlier but have correct information now, tell a fictional story, etc.
Stephen Pinker does a good job of debunking Sapir Whorf in _The Language Instinct_. The classic examples of the number of Eskimo words for snow is actually not true -- Inuit language has a lot of suffixes, but there are only a few different root words for snow. English has about as many root words for snow.
The other example was factory workers or something who mistakenly disposed of cigarette butts in 'empty' barrels that were actually full of flammable fumes. Well, the workers weren't fooled by language; there were fooled by invisible fumes. An empty barrel looks exactly like one full of fumes.
The human eye can distinguish millions of colors. This is true regardless of color names in a language.
You might be thinking of _Basic Color Terms_, or one of the studies used to counter it. _Basic Color Terms_ was an interesting anthropological and historical theory. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay looked at anthropological data and classical literature and came up with the theory that there are only 11 basic color categories in language. So for instance, if you hear that a tribe has only 6 different color words, they could tell you exactly what they are.
There are a lot of studies that either supported or offered evidence against this theory. It's pretty interesting, IMHO.
FWIW, here are the colors:
Dark (or black, if you have 3 or more colors)
Light (or white, if you have more than 3 colors)
Red
Yellow or Green (pick one)
Yellow or Green (pick whichever you didn't pick above)
Blue
brown
purple
pink
orange
gray
The thing about their theory is that you have the colors in this order. So if your tribe has two color words, they are dark and light. If you have 4 words, they are black, white, red, and either yellow or green.
Berlin and Kay went into depth describing exactly what counted as a color. For instance, a descriptive word that applies solely to an object or material, such as copper, was discluded ( I think there as usage from Homer that Berlin and Kay discluded ). There was an ethnography where an anthropolgist tried to use a descriptive term for the color of a green plant to describe a green dress. The people he was with only had black, white and red; they held that the term he was using could only be applied to that particular plant. The anthropologist thought it was a general term for green, but no, it only applied to a particular plant species, not any plant, nor any other green thing.
Because the dominant cultures in the US are descendant from European cultures; they don't go back *in North America* for thousands of years. They go back perhaps 300-400 years *in North America*.
Mexico, Central America and South America is a different story -- they Spaniards and Portugese promoted intermarriage with the Native peoples, and they built cities on top of existant Indigenous cities. So there is more of a mixture -- some cultural elements are from Europe, some cultural elements have been there for thousands of years.
I guess what you're saying is that if you ignore geography, all culture goes back hundreds of thousands of years to the first Homo sapiens?
As an American, my guess is that it has to do with not having old buildings around. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio. A lot of my friends lived in housing developments where they were older than the house they lived in!
After high school, I was an exchange student in Finland. I walked to school with my buddies and passed a church every day. Nothing special, just a large wooden church with service on Sundays.
One day, I asked my buddy "Hey, by the way, how old is that church?" He thought for a moment and said, "Oh, I think it's about... 800 years old." I was flummoxed. 800 years old! That thing should be a museum or a world history site! But here it was, just sitting there, holding church every Sunday for the past 800 years.
I think that when you grow up with very old buildings, you get the idea that people have been around for a long time, and will continue to be around for a long time. Things that people do today will have effects far into the future.
However, most of the United States is very young. Our oldest buildings are on the East Coast. Americans seem to have this unconscious idea that our grandparents came from farms that were wilderness just one generation before them. The world began not to long ago, and it might end very soon. That's why I think end-of-the-world cults are so popular in America, compared to the rest of the world.
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"If so, then you always have to be aware of your orientation in absolute space, even indoors, at night, and in unfamiliar surroundings, etc."
;)
Well... you don't *really* have to know which way is North... just the speaker and the listener have to agree.
Going back to my Columbus, OH example, I've noticed that some people, when they are giving location directions and pointing out landmarks, they are <whisper>pointing the wrong way</whisper>. I can think of one instance standing outside, and one instance inside a building. From the way they were pointing, they weren't even pointing in a fashion that they were looking at a map with north at the top. They were just randomly oriented. Anyway, my point is that, it doesn't matter wether they were actually pointed at the landmarks, whether their gestures were oriented towards an invisible map in front of them, with north at the top, or whether they were just totally off. As long as they were *consistent* in their turns, I could correct their wrong orientation and understand the directions.
So if you only have cardinal directions to refer to things in space, and, say, it's night, you might just say "the tree on the east", and the listener may or may not understand your meaning. So when they go to cut down the wrong tree, you say "No, the tree on the *East*!" And they say, "Oh, the *other* East"
Uh, I don't think that there are any highways that pedestrians are allowed to cross.
Well, I would just default it to have the car slow to a stop to avoid hitting the object. It doesn't matter what it is -- if it's not a car, and it's not part of the road, stop. Alert the driver so that they can make a decision, but still, stop. And, since you have all cars with an assured safe distance, no pile-up.
The car should know the road because there are reflectors or something stationary that defines the road, which it cross-checks against the sonar. The car should know other cars because other cars tell their existance and speed. That way the car knows what another car should look like in the sonar -- where it is, whether it is shrinking or growing.
Well, yeah, aside from keeping non-robot cars out of the way, I think the problems you bring up are addressed in my original proposal.
For the unexpected objects, you have the sonar system. If it detects an obstacle, it would slow to avoid hitting it, and perhaps also alert the drivers (who could decide to navigate through it, say, in the case of a cardboard box).
If the cars maintain a minimum safe distance, a car that detects an obstacle can alert cars behind it to the slow down. That would prevent a pile-up.
Also, each car has a little AI. If it detects the car ahead of it slowing down, it should slow down too, and alert cars behind it. If a car unexpectedly finds itself slowing down, it can signal cars behind it.
So the sonar handles unexpected objects, and unexpected slowdowns of other cars. The cars communicate with each other, so if a car isn't doing what it says it's doing, other cars can react to it.
As long as you have minimum assured safe distance, which might be greater for robot cars than for people, I don't see a problem with unexpected objects.
Well, here are a few problems with your train idea. First off, if one person wants to get off, the whole chain of cars has to stop for just that one person. Secondly, if some people in a car one to go one place, and other people in the car want to go another place, the car has to somehow break up to get the different people to where they want to go. When it does break up, it's stuck in the middle of other cars! The problem is also encountered when one car needs to go to another place from the other cars -- it's stuck in the middle of the cars. It can't get away.
If everyone was all going to the same place at once, the train would be great. However, if *you* are going from your garage to your office, this train of yours is a horrible idea. I think the only way it would work is if you have a lot of 'merge points' where masses of people going to the same place would get together on the same train. But then a person might have to make a lot of different hops from these different merge points to get to where they want to go. It's a big mess.
They might. I've seen it. I do it myself. (In our theoretical example, if the story has the teller heading south in the car, the teller stands facing south, not north).
What does this have to do with linguistic determinism?
"What I think Whorf was trying to say is that words are the way our minds can express and understand concepts. If we don't have a word, but we can express a concept in a language, then the language we use doesn't limit us."
You are right on both counts. What you are missing is that Whorf disagrees with your second sentence -- Whorf would say that language *limits* our expressive ability. Most linguists would argue that language *enables* expression. If there is a concept that we don't have a word or phrase for, we can build it out of lanauge. That's the critical difference. Whorf would have you believe that if it isn't in the dictionary, you aren't aware of it.
Well, I guess you would have to use cops to enforce the robot-only lane. I was thinking if there were some way to prevent regular drivers from entering the lane -- if it were totally fenced off from the rest of the freeway -- but then, how would robot cars get on?
As far as the fast lane, I think letting a car drive itself is the motivator. You could snooze or do work while your car drives. As far as speed, sure, certain places have a fast lane now, but do they get to go 150MPH? If you could go 150 MPH, that would turn a two-hour trip into a one-hour trip.
I don't think I'm misinformed about the nature of the theory. I may have painted it as a more extreme version of linguistic determinism than it is.
As far as the exploding barrels, I got the re-telling from Pinker's _The Language Instinct_. I don't have it in front of me, so I can't cite it, but Pinker is pretty harsh on any version of linguistic determinism. Pinker does re-tell the story of the exploding barrels not as a non-native speaker, but as workers mistaking barrels full of fumes for empty barrels.
Well, I'm stuck at blue. Yes, there are some things that are blue, but you don't need to talk about their blueness. Why would you need to talk about blue veins? They don't stay blue when you cut the body open (whether human or animal), and the are only visible through very pale, white human skin. Blue eyes are an extreme rarity in most of the world -- that doesn't explain why some Indians in South America would have a word for blue if they have only 7 color words. Nobody has blue eyes in that tribe -- it's unheard of, unimaginable. I could maybe see blue skies -- you would talk about blue skies to contrast it with bad weather. If you have blue skies, that means that the sky isn't dark and stormy. But then, you could just say "nice weather" or "sunny".
And then after that, I have no guess as to why it would follow any order. I don't think it would be something in the natural world that causes that order, but just something particular in the evolution of the human mind that makes this particular order.
In the back of the book, Berlin and Kay talk extensively about Russian's two words for blue. It's been a while since I read it, so I don't remember whether they talk about pink and purple.
Well, here in Columbus Oh, if you ask someone for driving directions, they will usually rotate their bodies to cardinal directions with each turn in the directions. I do it myself. Or, if you are in limited space, you point your body to the final destination, and then use your arm or hand to indicate the cardinal direction turns.
And besides, if you are capable of saying it, doesn't that require you to be capable of *thinking* it in the first place, or am I missing the point here?
Numbers are a special case. We spend a long time teaching children how to count properly in public schools. They've known 1 through 10 since they were 3 years old, but they still can't use them properly until like the 3rd or 4th grade. It's not a matter of language, is a matter of concept and understanding.
Well, I think it could work with a slow implementation. For instance, these special robot cars work just like regular cars when they are not on a robot road. Then, you have special robot lanes in popular, heavily used highways. This might be in, say, California, where you have a wealthy population that has to travel long distances to get places. In the robot lanes, you get to go like 150 mph -- so that there is a great benefit for you to spend extra to buy a robot car.
Then, there are more robot cars in the fleet, so they build more robot lanes. It creates a positive feedback loop.
"IANANL, but as I understand the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, on a basic level, it essentially stipulated that thought and language were interdependant. "
Nope. It says that language *is* thought -- that's what was so gripping about it when it came out. Most everybody agrees that language and though were interdependent. Sapir-Whorf says No, language is thought. There are no mental movies. It's all language. If you say "The barrel is empty" then you *think* that the barrel is empty, regardless of what you see.
That's really interesting. In the back of the book, they go over their different source languages. I don't remember if they said anything about Japanese.
;)
One interesting discussion was Russian -- it clearly has two seperate words for blue. They hypothesized that dark blue (or light blue) might be the "12 word".
I've been trying to figure out why there would be this order for words. The first few are easy to make up a reason for -- black and white, light and dark, used for contrasting. Red is a common indicator that plants use for ripe fruit. I spent a field study in the jungle one summer, and any red berries would jump out in the midst of the sea of green and brown. OK, so red is an obvious standout color in the woods. Then, you can use yellow/green to contrast with other plants, plants and berries, unripe fruit, etc.
After that it gets harder. I guess I can explain the above order of colors because you might need to contrast things in the environment. However, blue, while it is the color of the sky, doesn't need to be contrasted by color. You can just say "sky" to contrast it from anything on Earth. The rest of the colors are a total mystery to me. Obviously, more trade would expose you to more colors, but as to *why* it would follow that particular order... I don't know. Maybe that part of the theory is bunk
Gloating is an outward, visible celebration. Schadenfreude is an inner feeling, invisible to others.
Well, I haven't encoutered any of the weak forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Sorry I am undereducated ;)
I didn't understand the point of the article you linked to. Was it that the speakers described in the article use absolute cardinal direction when talking about movement in space? If that's so, isn't that just like saying "on its east side" instead of "on starboard", just using seperate words instead of inflections?
I've heard several scenarios where some language has some kind of information in an inflection or conjugation that is an optional word or phrase in English. IIRC there is some Native American language where you always specify the 'handedness' of a bit of knowledge -- I experienced it, I saw it, I saw the results of it, I heard it from the source, I heard it second-hand, or It is common knowledge. I guess the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that since use of this language requires you to use these inflections, the perception of reality is different than for speakers whose inclusion of that information is optional... is that correct?
I also notice that English speakers *do* use absolute cardinal directions when describe locations in space (at least here in Columbus, OH) -- they point with their hands.
I never saw Logan's run. Does each person have their own car on the rail? How do they pass one another?
Here's what I'm thinking:
I think that this system, as long as it had *only* robot cars, and no human drivers, would work.
Do you think there is some part of the brain/mind that believes that it *is* a unitary consciousness? I mean, even thought I understand that there are different parts of my body and consciousness that do things that I'm unaware of, I still *feel* like a single, global consciousness.
There's no way that Sapir Whorf can be true. If it were, that means that, just off the top of my head, we couldn't lie, entertain theoretical possibilities, hear two sides of the same event, understand that we were misinformed earlier but have correct information now, tell a fictional story, etc.
Stephen Pinker does a good job of debunking Sapir Whorf in _The Language Instinct_. The classic examples of the number of Eskimo words for snow is actually not true -- Inuit language has a lot of suffixes, but there are only a few different root words for snow. English has about as many root words for snow.
The other example was factory workers or something who mistakenly disposed of cigarette butts in 'empty' barrels that were actually full of flammable fumes. Well, the workers weren't fooled by language; there were fooled by invisible fumes. An empty barrel looks exactly like one full of fumes.
You might be thinking of _Basic Color Terms_, or one of the studies used to counter it. _Basic Color Terms_ was an interesting anthropological and historical theory. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay looked at anthropological data and classical literature and came up with the theory that there are only 11 basic color categories in language. So for instance, if you hear that a tribe has only 6 different color words, they could tell you exactly what they are.
There are a lot of studies that either supported or offered evidence against this theory. It's pretty interesting, IMHO.
FWIW, here are the colors:
The thing about their theory is that you have the colors in this order. So if your tribe has two color words, they are dark and light. If you have 4 words, they are black, white, red, and either yellow or green.
Berlin and Kay went into depth describing exactly what counted as a color. For instance, a descriptive word that applies solely to an object or material, such as copper, was discluded ( I think there as usage from Homer that Berlin and Kay discluded ). There was an ethnography where an anthropolgist tried to use a descriptive term for the color of a green plant to describe a green dress. The people he was with only had black, white and red; they held that the term he was using could only be applied to that particular plant. The anthropologist thought it was a general term for green, but no, it only applied to a particular plant species, not any plant, nor any other green thing.
Because the dominant cultures in the US are descendant from European cultures; they don't go back *in North America* for thousands of years. They go back perhaps 300-400 years *in North America*.
Mexico, Central America and South America is a different story -- they Spaniards and Portugese promoted intermarriage with the Native peoples, and they built cities on top of existant Indigenous cities. So there is more of a mixture -- some cultural elements are from Europe, some cultural elements have been there for thousands of years.
I guess what you're saying is that if you ignore geography, all culture goes back hundreds of thousands of years to the first Homo sapiens?
As an American, my guess is that it has to do with not having old buildings around. I grew up in Columbus, Ohio. A lot of my friends lived in housing developments where they were older than the house they lived in!
After high school, I was an exchange student in Finland. I walked to school with my buddies and passed a church every day. Nothing special, just a large wooden church with service on Sundays.
One day, I asked my buddy "Hey, by the way, how old is that church?" He thought for a moment and said, "Oh, I think it's about... 800 years old." I was flummoxed. 800 years old! That thing should be a museum or a world history site! But here it was, just sitting there, holding church every Sunday for the past 800 years.
I think that when you grow up with very old buildings, you get the idea that people have been around for a long time, and will continue to be around for a long time. Things that people do today will have effects far into the future.
However, most of the United States is very young. Our oldest buildings are on the East Coast. Americans seem to have this unconscious idea that our grandparents came from farms that were wilderness just one generation before them. The world began not to long ago, and it might end very soon. That's why I think end-of-the-world cults are so popular in America, compared to the rest of the world.