Help.Which one is correct?

Both are correct and neither, to my way of thinking, is more acceptable than the other.

Joe

Well....excluding the missing apostrophes on "till" they are both correct...but they both mean completely different things.

The first means that they had not planned to announce the engagement, but had changed their minds and announced it anyway.

The second means that they were still planning not to announce them until next year.

What Stuh said.

That's correct as well.

How do you know the meaning underneath the surface? I mean,I can understand the first one only by analysis,but I cann't feel it,so once again when I read the similar sentence, I would confuse it with the second one. My language sense is very weak.

ww, it's the conditional "hadn't intended" which clearly implies that something has been done which had not been intended. The second sentence has no such implication. It merely states that there was (and, presumably, still is) no intention.

Thanks.I get it now.

Hello skinny, welcome to A2K.

I disagree with your explanation...

Sentence A does not grammatically imply that the announcement has been made.

The implication that the announcement has been made is instead assumed because past perfect tense is less specific than past tense...and so we assume that the speaker would have used the most specific tense possible. Past tense does grammatically imply that the announcement has not been made, therefore in order for past present tense to have been the most specific choice, the announcement must not have been made.

So yes, sentence A does imply that the announcement has not been made, but this implication is not grammatical and not technically existing, it is merely an assumption made by English speakers.

Si claro. Ahora lo veo.

Works for me! What time are we eating, skinny?

In British usage, sentence (A) might sometimes mean the same as sentence (B). As Stuh has already pointed out, that the announcement has been made is implied by sentence (A), not explicitly stated. One runs across such convolutions in English novels. In American standard usage, however, the implication that sentence (A) describes a fait acompli is clearly understood.

Welcome to the land of the hair-splitters, skinny!

Skinny,

Please re-read my post. From your response, it is evident that you did not understand what I was trying to say.

I was certainly not denying that the first sentence implies that the announcement has already been made. If you will notice, I was the original person on this thread to make that point...you merely reitterated most of what I had said in your own post.

The point of contention is the reason for this implication, which you have falsely indicated as a grammatical reason.