I found a couple of cool language tools. Both are hosted by the Russian site Tower of Babel, which appears to be run by some serious linguists who have complied a huge number of etymologies.
One site will give you the pronuciation of Chinese words in any of the archaic pronuciations. Want to know how to pronounce a word in Eastern Han Chinese, or what the Shuowen gloss is, this site is for you. It only has about 4000 entries, but a lot of the basic words seem to be there.
They also have a dialect version, so if you want to know how to say something in Fuzhou or Jinan dialect this is the place to go.
For both of these you need to know the wierd linguist romanizations, [UPDATE I think it is IPA] and I’m not sure I have any practical uses for this, but it is still pretty cool
it’s as awesome as it is useless. not sure i follow all their romanisation methods but it’s certainly something i could waste a few hours on.
Also note a similar tool from Prof. David Branner: Yin tong http://americanorientalsociety.org/yintong/public/