Ah! A fellow cunning linguist!
Well, my take on linguistic determinism is this: I agree that language can't prevent individual thoughts from occuring, and that all it can do is help articulate certain ideas, but just think about how important it is to have a conceptual vocabulary for dealing with the world...
Lemme point you to the Brown and Lenneberg study (there have a bunch of experiments like this, but it's a good example).
In the experiment, people were shown a series of cards of different colors and then asked to put them in the order they saw them. Some of the subjects were English or Spanish speakers, and some of the subjects only spoke languages without words for seperate hues of colors (ie, one word for red, no "light red", no "dark red", no "maroon", no "pink", just one word for "red"). The study, and most of the studies like it, showed that people who already had words for "light blue" or "dark blue" were far more able to tell the difference between the two, and differentiate between which color they had seen.
See, a "proto-shape" sure can be less powerful than a non-verbal idea, but with a linguistic and lexical armature to support your non-verbal ideas, they become
verbal ideas capable of being communicated and abstracted more.
Just my $0.02 though
