This is a thin, geminate root: the second and third letters are the same מ, doubled. Its idea sits close to em, mother, an origin around which things gather. A nation is the human form of that: a people clustered around a common source. The hardware nut is the same picture in metal, the small mother-piece that a bolt seats into. Two surviving words, one image. Both are verified against pealim, niqqud included.
No verbs are lexicalized for this root in modern Hebrew, it survives only as nouns. That happens: a geminate root can leave just a handful of frozen forms behind, with no living verb to conjugate.
Same root letters, different noun moulds (mishkalim). The mould tells you the function: who does it, the act of doing it, or the thing produced.
Strip the prefixes, suffixes and vowels. Three consonants remain, and the meaning lives there.