I have seen several questions dealing with the use of "respectively" but still I am not sure how to use it.
Example:
We saw two persons, standing on the hill and near the tree, respectively.
I need a word to clarify that not both persons are standing both on the hill and near the tree, but that one person is standing on the hill and the other one near the tree. While this sentence is easy to rewrite (e.g. We saw one person... and another person...), this becomes more difficult in more complicated sentences and when I don't want to repeat longer words.
I was told that "respectively" can only be used in lists and I am not sure if "two persons" can be seen as a list (while "Person A and person B" would be a list). Moreover, I was told to use "correspondingly" instead.
Is "respectively" used correctly in the above sentence? If not, can I replace it with "correspondingly"?