The root means to lean, to tilt away from the upright. From that one slant, Hebrew builds a wide fan of meanings. A person who leans toward an opinion is inclined to it. A tent gets its slope when you pitch it, you "stretch it out" at an angle. And grammar borrows the same image: to conjugate a verb is to bend it through its forms, to incline it this way and that. Even the bed you lie down on and the direction down come from a body that has left the vertical. Pour נ־ט־ה into a verb for the act of leaning or conjugating; into a noun for the leaning thing. Every word here is verified against pealim, niqqud included.
The same root runs through the verb system. Each binyan is a voice: it bends the one idea into active, passive, causative or reciprocal. Tap to hear.
The plain pa'al (you yourself lean / are inclined) faces the causative hif'il (you tilt something else, you conjugate a verb), with the nif'al serving as the grammatical passive (it gets conjugated). The grammatical sense rides along in all three because conjugating is bending a word through its forms. The other binyanim are not lexicalized here.
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.