Compouding and a minimal Lexicon

I once saw a list of words (fewer than 150, as I recall) that the author of
the list claimed could be compounded together to respresent any word in
English.

As a crude example (I don't know if these words were in the list. It's been
too many years ago that I saw it.) suppose the words "teach" and "person"
were in the list.  The "teacher" might be "teach-person".  Or maybe "teach"
was even broken down to "share-knowledge", or some such, so that "teacher"
would be "share-knowledge-person".

I'm wondering if anyone else is aware of this list and could tell where to
find it.  As I recall it was part of a computation liquistics or artificial
intelligence project of some sort.  Unfortunately, after reading the paper
that accompanied it, I only glanced briefly at the list.  Before I could go
back and study it I misplaced it. I'd really like to take a closer look at
that list to see if the author's claim holds water.  Even Dutton used 493
words for SpeedWords, fewer than 150 words would be pretty astounding.

--Gary.