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Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

I wholeheartedly agree as well. The only nitpick I'd have on this incredible dissertation is on the "U" association with "U-boat" - this is an anglicized form of the German word "Unterseeboot" (undersea boat) which was itself shortened to "U-boot" (presumably the etymology of the Swedish "ubåt"). The first known use of the term "U-boat" is 1914, while the Germans and Swedish armed forces were commissioning submarines around a decade prior (in 1906 and 1904 respectively).

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It looks like it could also be an anglicized version of the modern Swedish word for submarine, which appears to be Ubåt [0]. In the US we definitely usually associate the word U-boat with the Germans, but I'm not sure how else one would anglicize Ubåt.

[0] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub%C3%A5t

The primary sources are hard to find on this, but the common year of first usage in English (1914) seems to coincide with the first sinking of a ship by a German submarine-launched torpedo [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Pathfinder_(1904)

Right, I didn't meant to imply that English got the word from Swedish, just that the author chose a reasonable anglicization that their readers would recognize.

I assume the author knows why they're called U-boats, but the fact is that modern English speakers don't call them U-boats unless they mean very specifically German World War II submarines and maybe not then.

I would use "U-Boat" but only in the same way I'd use "Boomer", to indicate a specific type of vessel in a particular context, if I meant a submarine, such as in a simple drawing, I'd say "submarine" and so would other English speakers I know.

And probably also German WW I submarines which were a factor drawing the US into WW I but might be less discussed as the war had less impact on the US and was longer ago

You're right, I didn't put that together, and now find myself descending down the rabbit hole of Navy slang :)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Glossary_of_U.S._Nav...

Swedish probably got the word from German, but u-båt is short for the Swedish word undervattensbåt, which is pretty much a straight-forward translation of submarine boat or Unterseeboot. The U- is not from German.

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