Why does one say in German, "Ihm schlug das Herz bis zum Hals"?

Question

Ihm schlug das Herz bis zum Hals.

What is the grammatical function of "ihm" in this context? I know that literally "ihm" here means for him.

Answer 1

This construct is a dative form which is also present in Latin, and not directly translatable into languages like English where the dative has almost vanished.

In languages that still have a living dative, this case can express

• ownership - My heart is beating to the neck - Mir schlägt das Herz bis zum Hals
• beneficiary or aggrieved party - Mir wurde das Auto gestohlen (The car was stolen from me)

Those are the two most important usages of dative (apart from receivership of something, which is the same as in English), beyond that there are some more you might want to look up in a German grammar, like dativus ethicus, iudicantis and finalis, .

Answer 2

Das Herz (Subjekt) schlug ihm (Objekt) bis zum Hals.

So the grammatical function is simply "Objekt". The meaning would translate to something like

His heart was beating that hard so that he can feel it in his throat.

Answer 3

You often find personal pronouns in dative case in German sentences, that are hard to translate into English, because there is a grammatical feature in German, that doesn't exist in English. Here are some other examples:

Das Buch gefällt mir.
The book likes me? What?
I like this book. (Ich mag dieses Buch.)

Der Hut flog ihm vom Kopfe.
The hat flew him? from the head?
The wind blew the hat from his head. (Der Wind blies den Hut von seinem Kopf.)

Das Herz schlug ihm bis zum Hals.
The heard beat him to the neck???
His heart was thumping. (Sein Herz pochte.)

This personal pronoun in dative case marks the receiver (beneficiary, victim) of the action.

The book is the subject, it does something. It pleases/suits. (There is no one-to-one translation of gefallen in English, that can be used the same way.) The dative object tells us, who is the person, that receives what the book is emitting.

In the second example the pronoun doesn't mark the owner of the hat. The man could also have worn a strangers hat. But the man was the victim of whatever made the hat to fly away (it was probably the wind).

In the last example, it is obviously his heart that was beating, but this is not what this pronouns says. The sentence does not say "his heart is beating". Is literally says

A heart is beating, and he can feel this heartbeat in his neck.

So, here again the pronoun doesn't talk about ownership. It tells us who is the victim (i.e. the person that recognizes the heartbeat)

Also the sentence from your other question:

Ihm blieb vor Schreck der Atem weg.

The pronoun ihm tells us who was suffering from being breathless. (Who was the victim of this action?)

Answer 4

The whole phrase means, "For him, the heart was beating into the throat.

In English, we would say, "His heart was beating into the throat."

But German doesn't use this construction for this, and similar, phrases. So they would use "ihm" where we would use "his"