I left Sweden in '99, and I can't quite remember what 'nu på torsdag' means. Something within me wants to say it means 'this coming thursday'.
I remember in those first few months in Sweden wrestling with the language and getting a lot of L1 interference wanting to say 'for a few days' and saying 'för några dagar' instead of 'i några dagar'. I asked a Swede what the mistake sounded like. I wondered if it sounded like English translated into Swedish, but he said that it sounded like 'för några dagar sedan' (a few days ago) but with the last bit omitted.
Anyway, 'nailed'. Yes, what I mean can be illustrated by a phenomenon in Modern English. Up until about 30 years ago, in modern English it was okay to say something like, "if a passenger leaves his luggage in the carriage, it will be taken to the depot' (terrible example) where 'he' means he or she. Since the feminist movement we have had to include both sexes with our general language and we've been a few years at nailing it down. 'They' finally has been accepted as not only a third person plural pronoun but as a third person common gender pronoun. Before this, though, we were sliding around trying to put things in the plural or clumsily saying 'he or she', 'him or her', his or hers'.
I was just wondering if the pre-conquest English actually had the concept 'ago' programmed in the language as 'nu for...' or they were struggling to say 'a few days counted back from now' - like it was a fairly fresh coinage using space pronouns metaphorically.
I find it interesting that 'ymb' seems to be used for 'ago' too. But, more interesting is that it seems that there is not a set of germanic cognates. Each language seems to have developed, independently, different ways of talking about actions that happened in a time counted back from the present, which would suggest that they hadn't bothered with that type of thing previously. However, I only know about German from Jayson, and Dutch and Plattdeutsch from the internet (and we know how reliable that can be).
But instances of 'ago' are seldom going to happen in Old English writing. They didn't go in for much dialogue or plays or anything, really, that was written in the present tense unless it was a homily saying that the antichrist was daily reaping more souls.