If I told you that when t comes before the i sound it's pronounced like the English ch, and d follows the same pattern to sound like the English j, or if I mentioned that x always sounds like sh except when it sounds like z, you might well give up entirely, so I won't.
Prologue
In the year 1830, after the formation of Starways Congress, a robot scout ship sent a report by ansible: The planet it was investigating was well within the parameters for human life. The nearest planet with any kind of population pressure was Baía; Starways Congress granted them the exploration license. So it was that the first humans to see the new world were Portuguese by language, Brazilian by culture, and Catholic by creed. In the year 1886 they disembarked from their shuttle, crossed themselves, and named the planet Lusitania-- the ancient name of Portugal. They set about cataloguing the flora and fauna. Five days later they realized that the little forest-dwelling animals that they had called porquinhos-- piggies-- were not animals at all.
For the first time since the Xenocide of the Buggers by the Monstrous Ender, humans had found intelligent alien life.
The piggies were technologically primitive, but they used tools and built houses and spoke a language. "It is another chance God has given us," declared Archcardinal Pio of Baía. "We can be redeemed for the destruction of the buggers."