I can help you. China's writing begins at “The oracle inscriptions of the Yin Ruins” Yin is the capital of the Shang dynasty. It was written on animal bones,the content is the effort of divine. then inscriptions on ancient bronze objects，it's on bronze,the content may be some proverb. In Warring States，every country has its own character，they even cannot recognize the character from another country. In Qin dynasty.First Emperor of Qin want to be a real emperor，so he let characters unified into one. In Han dynasty,for conveniece ,they simplified the character.Because in ancient they just need to recognize them,but in Han dynasty,they became more useful。The new kind of character came： official script. For the same reason it was simplified again into regular script and Cursive script step by step. And now it simplified again into “Simplified Chinese characters”,this is the history. There are diffirent kind of dictionaries actually. For the meaning of the words:1、《尔雅》 erya 2、《释名》shiming For dialects in ancient：1、《方言》 fangyan （by Yangxiong） For pronunciation：1、《广韵》guangyun 2、《集韵》jiyun and etc.(a lot of them) For character：《说文解字》shuowenjiezi. wish it can help you. For some more you can find me on skype:"ishmail119"

can you give me your email，so I can send you some websites，ebooks in chinese(the research on these things、the ancient dictionaries)，and the name of english books.

Sure, I can help you. But they are all written in Chinese, I'm not sure if you can read them. Give me your e-mail address, I will send you the materials later. :)