Roman King Numa as an Indo-European Distributor

The linguistic origin of Numa, particularly known as a king's name in Latin, has not received much attention in the scholarship. This paper is devoted to describing the name's history from an Indo-European standpoint. The suggested reconstruction is *nomh(1)eh(2)-, which is morphologically the tau o mu eta-form of the verbal root *nemh(1)- 'distribute' and semantically a masculine individualized noun meaning 'distributor'. The name Numitor, which is probably related, is also included in the discussion.