Curiosity killed the cat

I am curious to what extent Japanese has retained the use of 4 kanji phrases in modern parlance. The title of this post is a phrase that we use in English maybe when a child is being too curious and is an example of a phrase that this 4 kanji phrases might be used to represent in Chinese where there use is, perhaps, more ubiquitous than in Japanese?


But what caused me to question this in the first place?

意味不明, I saw this phrase and I get the meaning right away from Chinese, but it brings up what is, to me, a very pertinent question about Japanese and that is: to what extent have the Chinese readings been retained in Chinese. With this example I think the nuances of my question become more clear when evidenced by the following comparison: 不 is typically read as ふ in modern Japanese, but is typically pronounced as bù (/bú) in modern Chinese, it can also be pronounced as ぶ in modern Japanese, but this appears to be much less common. What I find interesting is that here is that the common pronunciation of the character in question in modern Japanese seems more similar to the pronunciation of the character 否, for which 不 was an alternate reading in classical Chinese. I just wonder if there are any relations in the evolution of pronunciation here between how this character used to be pronounced in the two countries in, say, the 19th century up to the early 20th century.




（意味不明＝いみふめい）