More about pigs (updated)

Basque urde 'pig' is a Neolithic Wanderwort also found in NEC *wHa:rttɬ’wǝ 'boar, pig' and IE *pork´-o- 'young pig, piglet' and whose ultimate origin is Austronesian *beRek 'domesticated pig'.

On the other hand, there's the isolated Roncalese form ti, apparently similar to Albanian thi < IE *suH- 'pig'¹.

Basque herauts 'male boar', herause, heusi, iñaus, iraus(i), irusi, i(h)ausi 'heat of sow' is a compound *ena-uśi whose second member is probably related to Kartvelian *eʃw- 'boar, pig' and possibly also to Berber *kus- 'pig'², ultimately deriving from a Vasco-Caucasian root 'ungulate' (see this post).

This word has been the object of a confusion as regarding the Aquitanian theonym HERAVSCORRITSEHE. Although the German linguist Hugo Schuchardt correctly proposed its first element to be related to Basque errauts, erhauts 'cinder, dust' (a compound from erre 'burnt' and hauts 'dust'), he changed his mind afterwards and linked it to herauts, being unaware of the variants which point to a nasal in Proto-Basque.

This mistake, resulting from a poor understanding of the ortographic conventions of the Aquitanian inscriptions (in Latin), which employed -R- to represent the thrill rhotic (Basque <rr>) instead of the flap one (Basque <r>), as well as laziness for reconstructing the protoform of the Basque word, has been copied down by Vascologists to this day².

This root is also found in Sardinian irrussu 'little boar, whose first member is related to IE *(w)eper-o- 'boar', an interesting Neolithic word linked to Arabic ʕifr-, ʕufr- 'pig, boar; piglet', ultimately deriving from an Eurasiatic root 'ungulate' also found in IE *kapr-o- 'male goat' and Arabic ɣafr-, ɣufr- 'young of deer or goat, goat kid'.

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¹ Which should be reconstructed as *suq- in account of Celtic *sukk-o-. 
² This is the source of Asturian gocho, Basque (Zuberoan) kutxu, Catalan cotx, Aragonese cochín, Spanish cochino, French cochon 'pig'. 
³ Gorrochategui: Estudio sobre la onomástica indígena de Aquitania (1984), pp. 330-331. 

Proto-Basque and non-standard Basque

Proto-Basque is the reconstructed ancestor of the historical Basque dialects, presumably spoken in the Late Iron Age and whose main features were worked out by the Vascologist Koldo Mitxelena in his magna opus Fonética Histórica Vasca¹. The consonantal system of Mitxelena's Proto-Basque didn't had a voiced/voiceless contrast but a fortis (tense)/lenis (lax) one. This was only relevant in medial position (between vowels), because at word-initial only lenis phonemes might appear.

With regard to stops, the French linguist André Martinet (Économie des changements phonétiques, 1955) posited an older system modelled after Danish, in which plosives could be realized either as voiceless aspirated (fortis) or mild voiceless (lenis) at word-initial and as mild voiceless (fortis) and approximants (lenis) between vowels. In Mitxelena's Proto-Basque, the aspirated plosives would have evolved to [h], which had no phonemic value.

I call this process Martinet's Law, and for comparative purposes we should differentiate between Early Proto-Basque (before Martinet's Law) and Late Proto-Basque (after Martinet's Law), sometimes called "canonical" or "Mitxelena's" as opposed to Bengtson's.

In the Aquitanian inscriptions we can found forms with initial h- like HALSCO or HAVTENN² vs. others with t- like TALSCO (Iberian talsku) or TAVTINN (Iberian tautin) and different geographical distribution. This isogloss is a particular case of Martinet's Law, which separates Proto-Basque from other linguistic varieties like Iberian.

There are also Basque words like k(h)ako 'hook'³ < IE *ko(n)g- 'peg, hook, claw' < Paleo-Eurasian *ɣoŋɣV 'peg, nail' or tara 'young branch' < IE *d^hal- 'sprout' which don't follow Martinet's Law and  constitute what I call non-standard Basque⁴. They are late loanwords from those linguistic varieties, whose speakers were stigmatizated people like highlanders or nomadic shepherds, a fact which lead to their ultimate extinction in the High Middle Ages (there's evidence in NW Catalonia's toponymy of a Bascoid language spoken there until aprox. 1000 AD).

Unlike his original proposal, Martinet's Law also can occur between vowels. For example, Basque zahar 'old' < EPBasq. *sak^haŕ⁵ vs. Iberian sakaŕ (Starostin's PNC *tʃ’HǝqwV 'big').

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¹ For a summary of Mitxelena's work, see Trask's The history of Basque (1997).

² Compare Basque hauta 'election, excellent' < Celtic *toutā- 'people'.
³ In the Salazarian dialect there's an isolated form kaiku 'aquiline' found part of the compound sudur-kaiku 'aquiline nose'.

⁴ It's a pity Bengtson didn't recognize this as a genuine phenomenon.

⁵ Basque /z/ represents a lamino-alveolar sibilant [s].