Hacker News Reader

I only see seven vowels in the graph.

I also only see four digraphs, for consonants only.

It looks like U is replacing У-with-a-line, and W (!) is replacing У

see chart with three rows for other vowel sounds

W for У is natural because that's how it works in Arabic.

But Kazakh is not in any way, shape or form related to Arabic. Nor is there widespread knowledge of how to write Arabic among the population.

No doubt, but the academics who designed this alphabet definitely can write Arabic, and the letter W was going spare anyway.