Talk:Kindheit

I've seen that the plural was deleted back and forth. However, there can't be any discussion about it. It is quite easy to attest it even from the titles of professionally published books in google books (not to mention their content). And the scientific newspaper corpus at www.dwds.de has 16 hits in Berliner Zeitung (1994-2005), 15 in Tagesspiegel (1996-2005), and 79 in Die Zeit (1946-2018). Thus, it is not only a valid but actually rather a common form.

In regular speech it's uncommon and surely deserve a note a like Elter. Duden too gives no plural and DWDS even states "wird nur im Singular verwendet" (is only used in the singular). -Der Jud (talk) 16:45, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

In this case though the reader can guess himself that a plural exists only occasionally, as often with such abstracted terms. Fay Freak (talk) 20:26, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

Right. The plural is no rarer than with other abstract nouns, nor is it rarer than English "childhoods". Except for the fact that in German you would usually say "Sie haben beide eine schreckliche Kindheit gehabt", while in English you say "They've both had terrible childhoods". But that as well is a general grammatical phenomenon. English uses the plural because among the two of them its two childhoods, while German uses the singular because each of them has had just one. 89.12.198.46 20:06, 27 April 2021 (UTC)