Hi, Alexander!  Recently you wrote in a message to Ardith Hinton:   
      
    ak>  A soup kitchen? What is it? I always thought that kitchen   
    ak>  is a room to prepare any food.   
      
      
              From my OXFORD CANADIAN DICTIONARY:   
      
                 soup kitchen [n.]   
                 a place where warm meals, usu. soup, are served   
                 to the needy for little or no charge.   
      
   While such places may offer other items from time to time, I imagine soup is   
   typically on the menu because it's a cheap & easy way to feed a crowd when a   
   particular organization depends on who chose to donate what this week.  :-))   
      
      
      
    ak>  (??? ... that a kitchen is THE room... which article   
    ak>  is more correct?)   
      
      
              I would say "a".  In Vancouver there are various churches & other   
   charitable organizations which offer such services on a regular basis.  It's   
   also possible, though not common, for a single-family residence to have more   
   than one kitchen.  Some Jewish families have two because it's easier to keep   
   kosher that way.  Some folks from India & other parts of Asia where extended   
   families often live together tell us they prefer two.  And I understand that   
   years ago... before the advent of electric fans, of air conditioning, and of   
   cookstoves which didn't take an hour or two to finish heating up... a lot of   
   farm families on the North American prairies had summer kitchens attached to   
   the exterior of their houses.  If you imagine what it's like preserving food   
   with a method which requires boiling large amounts of water for a long time,   
   during the heat of August... it's hot work even in this area, where we don't   
   have a mountain range & eighteen hours by train between us & the ocean.  :-)   
      
      
      
    ak>  IMHO, we can say that English doesn't prohibit us from   
    ak>  a new words invention.   
      
      
              Not at all... English is very adaptable!  It had to be when, even   
   before the dawn of recorded history, people from +/- a dozen different parts   
   of Europe settled in the British Isles.  It's routine for an English/English   
   dictionary to include several pages of new words with each new edition.  :-)   
      
      
      
    ak>  When we say "soup making," without hyphen, and we mean   
    ak>  that "soup" is an adjective   
      
      
              Technically it's still a noun, according to the dictionary... but   
   when such words are used as adjectives they may be called "noun adjectives".   
      
      
      
   ak>  and therefore two separate words are correct.   
      
      
              In English, yes.  In German, folks apparently link nouns together   
   just as we do... which may be where we got the idea... but OTOH they'd spell   
   the whole lot as one word.  Remember the Saxons from the history of English?   
   They emigrated from Saxony, which is part of Germany nowadays....  :-)   
      
      
      
    ak>  But when we make "soup-making" we mean a single word.   
      
      
              Uh-huh.  In some cases this might be an intermediate step between   
   (using the same example) "soup making" and "soupmaking", however.  One of my   
   Canadian-born relatives, who would be 100 years old if she were still alive,   
   spelled "today" & "tomorrow" with a hyphen... and I've noticed this spelling   
   in books from the early 20th century.  Now, North American recipes often use   
   "teaspoon" & "tablespoon" as measurements.  Both are in such common use that   
   we even have abbreviations for them.  So why would people write the names of   
   some kinds of spoons as one word & others as two??  IMHO we tend to condense   
   terms like this as time goes by & we become more familiar with them....  :-)   
      
      
      
      
   --- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+   
    * Origin: Wits' End, Vancouver CANADA (1:153/716)