Yes, there are people who believe that thought is language (and not just inner dialogue as you mention in this thread). That without ideas formed in language as a precursor they wouldn't be able to think about those ideas, and that they do this thinking through the internal manipulation of other words.
I'm not quite sure what it's about as I'm not one of them, but they exist.
But when I am trying to actively think of something I know no other way than to think in words. I am not a visual thinker (I'm kind of aphantasic, when you ask me to think about a horse, only an idea pops up in my head without any specific image and I have to try really hard and describe the horse with words to make some kind of misty parts of the horse).
I've had way too many instances of not being able to find a word to express an idea, or not remembering the specific words people expressed but just what I think was the gist of what they said (whether or not I interpreted them correctly) to think of myself as a verbal thinker. When it comes to word production sometimes they just come, at other times it takes me time, and I can go into a state where they just flow, but in that state my conscious is checked out of the process. It has the experience of an autonomic process almost.
I do have an inner monologue though (frequently caught up with OCD counting, or at the moment Taylor Swift's Anti-Hero song as well as speaking the words I am writing as I am writing them).
> only an idea pops up in my head without any specific image and I have to try really hard and describe the horse with words to make some kind of misty parts of the horse
Is this idea the words which describe the horse, or a pre-visual/pre-verbal idea of a horse?
I mean you can look at the speed of innovations. things were slow as hell until the 1400s, when the printing press was invented, the industrial revolution would've never kicked off without the ability to push thoughts and language into more hands.
Education is all about language, hard to learn in grunts and pointing.
There's more that goes into actual memories than language, though language is how we understand it interpret them... we have senses, feelings, and other contexts associated with a memory but without a word for sadness or anger, how do we know what we're even feeling?
Language is one of the things that truly separates us from animals and before written language our hunter gatherer ancestors were little more than animals wearing fur skins.
When I imagine a tree, I get the image and the feel and the scent, the qualia. Hearing the word “pine” for the first time did not make me smell anything. I had to learn to associate those syllables with my memories of pine trees, and they only work between me and other people who have done that.
> but without a word for sadness or anger, how do we know what we're even feeling?
"I'm feeling kind of a mix between the way I felt that time that thing happened and that time I did that other stuff. I don't like it." Without words at all, this would be a flash of memory of the two events which I would realize are related (emotionally) to the event happening to me now.
For anger, particularly, the emotion (maybe better said to be a mood state) usually comes with a lot of drives. Whether we have a word for what we're feeling, we know what actions we want to take because of the feeling. Or at least I do.
Circumlocutions are born out of ideas without words to express them. E.g. (literally 5 seconds to watch the relevant part): https://youtu.be/UEKWXFESU68?t=150
> Language is one of the things that truly separates us from animals and before written language our hunter gatherer ancestors were little more than animals wearing fur skins.
Animals have a crap load of language-like elements, with taught dialects and the like. These are seen in social bees, prairie dog communities, and numerous other animals. We humans have very complex languages that facilitate a ton of nuance and novel information types. But don't sell animals, or our ancestors, short. Human civilization appears to pre-date written language by a number of centuries, with passed-down spoken language lasting for millennia (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/10/indigeno... ).
https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/03/11/the-linguistic-ge...
> “They’re able to describe the colour of clothes the humans are wearing, they’re able to describe the size and shape of humans, even, amazingly, whether a human once appeared with a gun… In one 10th of a second, they say ‘Tall thin human wearing blue shirt walking slowly across the colony.'”
No. They still have conscious awareness. I think this is more a matter of conscious identification (or lack thereof) with various modes of thought.