Coding exceptions with patter-matching

[Tiago Tresoldi]

Hello people,

I'm involved with a project of machine translation in Python
(http://traduki.sf.net/). I'm
working alone on the code now, and now I found a huge problem. Let me
tell that sentence in
Traduki are split into a quite-complex list structures with lists,
integers and Unicode
strings inside. A language is first translated into this list and then
to the wanted language.

Now I've found a problem dealing with exceptions in human languages.
For example, how to code
that you have feet instead of foots? How to code that italian verbs
ending in -care and -gare
need an -h before the standard suffix when indicative form? And so on.
Sometimes I need to
look at the value of more than 10 variables to know if it is a
language-exception or not. I know
it would be impossible and stupid to hard-code all the exception, so I
started to think about
if I can write in Python a kind of matching pattern to get the right
translations. I am
thinking about an ASCII-file (I am not a very skilled programmer...)
with contents like:

0 0 1 0 12 0 8 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 2 en foots feet
1 0 0 1  3 0 0 1 0 1 4 6 0 0 1 it -care, -gare -ch*, -gh*

and so on (this code is not true, please! :).

I am sure that there must be a better way for doing this. Please
remember that there are almost
infinite entries to this database. Can someone help me with this?

Thanks in advance for everything.

Tiago Tresoldi