Hi, Brent,

Not sure that I implief that a culturally accepted label "red" is the same as the aware perception of redness.  The intrinsic quality of light waves at frequency of 700 nm is fundamental and is something that has existed long before humanity.  

So when we discuss a perception of "redness", called anything by any culture, we can also dissociate the exact arbitrary label, and in my thought experiment, the label turns out to be irrelevant.  Go to any hardware store and walk down the nuts and bolts aisle and don't look at the labels.  Eventually you will find some fastener or screw-like thing for which you have no label.  You can learn its identity well enough via visual inspection, and maybe even figure out its use.  You might never know the label, but you still experienced it and created a model of it in your brain.  Semantics and labels are irrelevant to perception and awareness of that perception.  

So in what I have shared I kept separate the (a) object, (b) the mind model of the object, (c) the mind model of the symbol (word or logoglyph) for the object, and active awareness of a and b (and for some but not most people, c). The card catalogue is not usually a conscious endeavor, but can be made so (word association and other memory association tricks and tools).

In my view, Evolutionarily, our conscious perception almost certainly predates language as we would recognize it; labels adorn our mind model but are not necessary for our holding or experiencing them.

If I am missing anything perhaps we can chat 1 on 1.  I would hate to have a superficial or peripheral grasp of the ideas you have organized.