Well you can even fall back to saying that all sensations are abstractions. After all when you feel wet there is no part of your brain that “gets wet”. But the constant mirroring of the external world by your mental abstractions is not something over which you have full control and you couldn’t stop it if you wanted to. Language has nothing to do with it. After all you don’t personally assemble the images you see from your rods and cones, nor did you ever get to choose what cinnamon smells like.