I’ve read this and a coup of associated threads with interest in order to understand the nature of sections and segments, and found two definitions
“A segment is a meaningful chunk of text, such as a sentence or a line of verse.” ref
“we endeavored to keep our section numbers in line with the previously-published section numbers of the PTS editions. So what happened was that the PTS published certain texts with section numbers, but they didn’t do it for all texts,” ref
So, for the purpose of understanding segment boundaries, the sections simply reflect a historical fact, and the decimal representation of the segment boundaries is not significant.
@sujato here are a couple of follow-up questions, asked because I’ve become involved in the project mentioned here:
- (Just for interest) Who put in the paragraph breaks: the Mahāsaṅgīti editors, the PTS or SC?
- Can we unpack “a meaningful chunk of text” a bit further? A discourse analyst or a psycholinguist would find the term unproblematic, but a grammarian could only work with “such as a sentence”. It’s clear that there’s not a one-to-one correspondence between sentence and segment. Do you recall how you were operating? (Maybe looking for ‘translatable chunks’ or remembering something like ‘chantable chunks’?)