> I'm thinking of trying to unambiguously
> (which rules out {zo'e}, if you're willing to nitpick) say "now", assign
> that time to a variable,
I guess you could use something like "ko'a goi lo nau fasnu".
> and then use that in subsequent discussion.
Ah, but once the moment of the assignment has passed, the now you have
assigned is no longer the current now. :)
> A
> somewhat realistic example in English:
> I went home. Then I went to the store, like you asked. But before all that,
> I went to my friend's house, where we did blah blah blah interesting stuff.
> A decent way to do this, now that I think about it a little more, would
> probably be to use {lo tcika be lo du'u go'i} and {lo tcika be lo du'u
> go'e}; it would be nice to be able to readily grab these as a sentence is
> said and (unambiguously) store them, though.
But "nau" is for the time of the utterance, not for the time of what
the utterance is describing. In this example "nau" doesn't play any
relevant role, since eveything in the story has happened in the past
of the time when the story is told.