> without language, your thoughts are just emotions
That's not true. You can think "I want to walk around this building" without words, in abstract thoughts or in images.
Words are a layer above the thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. You can confirm this if you ever had the experience of trying to say something but forgetting the right word. Your mind knew what it wants to say but it didn't knew the word.
Chess players operate on sequences of moves dozen turns ahead in their minds using no words, seeing the moves on the virtual chessboards they imagine.
Musicians hear the note they want to play in their minds.
Our brains have full multimedia support.
It's probably not as simple as just being emotions, but actually there's a really interesting example here: Helen Keller. In her autobiography she describes what it was like before she learned language, and how she remembers it being almost unconscious and just a mix of feelings and impulses. It's fascinating.