There are so many of these traditional English names that have, seemingly, unrelated nicknames. Who started this and are we still doing it with names today?
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Nobody started it. It’s a natural language development to shorten people’s names in familiar contexts.
Some English names are very old, and have had a lot of time to go through various changes. Pronunciation of English has also changed at the same time, leaving remnants in some of these names. That’s how we got Richard -> Rich -> Rick -> Dick.
Chuck is a term of endearment (e.g. like “babe” or “dude”) in parts of England, and was incorrectly assumed to be a shortening of Charles at some point in 19th Century America.
Jimmy means “little James”, from Hebrew, and that was shortened to just Jim.
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