I don’t know why this is so. Many frum people don’t want to change the name of the one after who they are naming a child. “
I don’t diminish the chashivus of the person for whom a child may have been named. But – why was the ORIGINAL person named in a language that is not L”K (which includes Aramaic, because it is Gemorah Loshon)? Let’s say that someone is a Baal Teshuvah who never had a Jewish name at all and his birth father was a non-Jew. His name is Steven. He became a frum Yid and a great baal middos tovos and outstanding learner. But his name is still Steven (ben Avraham, I guess). Any Jewish name that he may adopt, was not given to him at birth. So should kids be named Steven after the name by which he was always known? I doubt that you will find many such children.
BTW, my Rov ZT”L told me when I was first naming children, that it is ALWAYS a zechus to the person for whom a child is being named, to find the L”K translation of the Yiddish name and use that instead. Thus, a girl might be named Tzipporah, in memory of a Faigah.
It is not necessarily true that a male Jewish name is followed by a Yiddish name (when the Yiddish is used)that reflects that Jewish name, i.e. Tzvi Hersh. I had an Uncle Sholom Mendel. Isn’t Mendel typically preceeded by Menachem? But he was named for a Sholom and a Mendel. How is Mendel any more “heilige” than Mark? The Mendel for whom he was named might have been a a very nice poshuteh Yid. But there are a LOT of poshuteh Yidden who have secular names, who are wonderful people. No one is giving their children those names at the Omud.
I know it is difficult for some people to see this point, because we have been conditioned to think of Yiddish as extremely holy, our Mama Loshon (though Sephardic Jews might argue that point). But if we are truly objective, Yiddish TODAY is really no more holy in the sense that it may have once been, than English is. Torah is disseminated in English in numbers far greater than Yiddish ever was. Most Jews speak English, even those who speak Yiddish in this country, so English is the real unifier today. I am not putting down Yiddish. I simply do not understand how it came to be revered to the point that people stopped using L”K for naming their children, and started using Jewish vernacular instead.