One puzzle is the mass of the particle. The recent experiments indicate that the top quark weighs 176 billion electron volts, more than any other particle, and 10 times what scientists had predicted a decade ago. But in other cases, you'd think we'd be confused. It all seems very arbitrary. As one word transmutes into another, vowels turn long or short.
Syllables mysteriously swap emphasis.
In many cases, as in IdEa, ide-Ation, the old root could be a different word altogether, so different is the word stress. Yet, points out Hopkins linguist Luigi Burzio, in our native languages, we all can follow such transmutations with ease. It seemed that we must all have learned a set of implicit rules, from experience, about the various prefixes and suffixes. So for decades linguists beavered along to find them, piling up masses of special words, groups of words, and situations, each one requiring its own special rule, with of course exceptions. Too complex to be true, given how easily children learn their native languages, no special gift required.