The answer is, NO! You can't use [ʌ] to represent a near-open central vowel within the IPA system. Never, not under any circumstances. However, standardised language-specific phonemic transcription systems do not, and CANNOT faithfully use the IPA system. The standardised phonemic transcription system for English uses /ʌ/--note carefully the slanty brackets--to represent the STRUT vowel. The idealised conception of the STRUT vowel is a near-open central vowel. However, note that this is not being used as part of the IPA system, but merely uses a symbol from the IPA system ...
– Araucaria - HimAug 30 '21 at 05:03
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... to represent a language-specific phoneme in English. Notice that a phoneme, in some sense, does not actually have a specific sound and cannot be pinpointed in a scientific or exact way, unlike an actually uttered sound, which can be. When using square brackets [ ], this indicates faithful phonetic use of the International IPA system as might be used to compare languages or might be used to compare utterance of the same words or phonemes. Here a near-open central vowel will be represented as [ɐ], and and open-mid back rounded vowel as [ʌ].
– Araucaria - HimAug 30 '21 at 05:14