Reading group: Augustine’s The Teacher (De magistro), on whether words teach us anything, in three lunch hours

Augustine wrote The Teacher around 389, as a dialogue with his son Adeodatus, who was about sixteen and who died not long afterwards. It's short, perhaps forty pages, and it's the strangest thing I've read by him. I'd like to read it with anyone who is around, in three lunch hours, roughly a third at a time.

Sitting one: words that point at words. Father and son take a line of Virgil word by word and ask what each word signifies. The trouble starts with nihil, "nothing". If every word is a sign of something, what is "nothing" a sign of?

Sitting two: can anything be shown without signs? A bird-catcher who could teach his craft simply by doing it, and a word from the Book of Daniel, saraballae, a kind of head-covering, which no explanation makes clear until you see the thing.

Sitting three: the inner teacher. Augustine's conclusion is that words never teach us things. At most they prompt us to look, and what we learn, we learn by consulting the truth within, which for him is Christ.

Two reasons this matters beyond Augustine. Wittgenstein opens the Philosophical Investigations with a passage from the Confessions, Book I, about how the child Augustine learned words by watching adults point, and spends much of the book taking that picture apart. And as an accountant I spend my days with signs, figures that are only as good as what they point to.

Any translation will do. Questions in the thread as we go.